The Talkowski Lab is thrilled to announce the awarding of a fellowship grant to two of our PhD students, Ryan Collins and Kiana Mohajeri. Both Kiana and Ryan were awarded the Graduate Research Fellowship from the NSF in the field of genomics. Ryan and Kiana were chosen out of over 13,000 applications. There were a total of 2,000 awards granted to several different institutions. Of those 2,000 awards, only 13 were given in the field of genomics.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) Fellowship is perhaps the most widely recognized and prestigious predoctoral fellowship awards in the US. Along the with NIH F31, it is the established program in which the scientific community invests significant resources into the most promising young trainees in the country. The NSF targets basic science, the NIH targets translational or disease based research. The NSF GRFP is high competitive, and receiving one is somewhat of a crowned jewel in the US as it provides funding for three years over a five-year PhD training period, with applicants applying in their first or second year, and is considered an outstanding launching point for a young scientific career.