The National Science Foundation recently awarded funding to nine Dartmouth alumni for graduate study.
The NSF's Graduate Research Fellowship Program grants the research fellowships to 1,000 people annually and will provide funding that supports recipients for three years. Recipients are early in their graduate careers and have diverse interests relevant to the foundation.
Joseph Brown '00 graduated with a major in engineering sciences and received the NSF funding for research in nanoscale materials processing. He is currently in his second year at the University of Colorado in Boulder's four-year Ph.D. program in mechanical engineering.
Cayelan Carey '06 will use the award to examine an invasive species of toxic cyanobacteria, a blue-green algae that appears in low-nutrient lakes in the northeastern United States.
"I became interested in this subject because this species started blooming in Lake Sunapee, which is about thirty minutes south of Hanover, the summer before my off-term," she said.
Carey is currently studying toxic cyanobacteria in Sweden, and will begin working towards her Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Cornell University this August.
"My ultimate goal is to understand why and how low-nutrient lakes can suddenly exhibit algal blooms and the obvious implications for water quality and lake food webs," she said.
NSF funding will enable Clare Gupta '04 to research natural resource management and wildlife conservation policy in southern Africa. Gupta began her research in Africa while at Dartmouth with a year-long research project focusing on conflicts among humans and wildlife around national parks in Botswana.
The current UC Berkeley graduate student hopes to receive her Ph.D. from the school's Environmental Science, Policy and Management department.
Award recipient Margaret Mills '01 plans to study pigment patterns in zebrafish in order to gain insight into the genetic and cellular bases for the appearance of the adults of these species. She is currently working towards a Ph.D. in molecular and cellular biology at the University of Washington.
Neha Narula '03 will study distributed systems and game theory with the funding. She will begin a Ph.D. program in computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the fall.
Elizabeth Norton '05 plans to study behavioral and neurological characteristics of dyslexia. For her senior honors thesis at Dartmouth, Norton used magnetic resonance imaging to study language in the education and linguistics and cognitive science departments, and is currently working in the M.A./Ph.D. program in child development at Tufts University.
Nicholas Rule '04 will study cognitive and neuroscience techniques.
"I basically study the social neuroscience of first impressions. This is mostly focused on accurate judgments of people," he said.
Rule credits his success to the experience he gained at Dartmouth as a psychology and linguistics double major.
"I started working with MRI at Dartmouth and got some good training when I was an undergrad there," he said. "[And a] linguistics background really allows me to think about science in a different way."
Rule is currently enrolled in Tufts University's Ph.D. program in psychology.
Sara Thiebaud '06, who is currently in Harvard University's Ph.D. program in systems biology, will use her funding to study how human cells repair DNA damage.
Culture, race and social stratification, and East Asian societies are the focuses of Sharon Yoon '04's research. She plans to expand on her Dartmouth senior thesis by writing a dissertation about racial identity construction and discrimination of third and fourth generation Korean minorities in Japan and China. She is currently enrolled in the Ph.D. program in sociology at Princeton University.
In addition, the NSF offerered honorable mention to Bart Butler '06 for his research in particle physics, Gretchen Gehrke '05 for her research in geochemistry, Sarena Goodman '05 for her research in economics, Marianne Karplus '04 for her research in geophysics, Emma Lubin '06 for her research in genetics, Evelyn Mervine '06 for her research in marine geology and geophysics, Gabrielle Miller-Messner '01 for her research in evolutionary biology, Hannah Murnen '06 for her research in chemical engineering, Adam Sepulveda '02 for his research in ecology, and Jeremy Tran '05 for his research in evolutionary biology.
