The National Science Foundation announced on Apr. 16 that twelve University of Pittsburgh students have been selected as recipients of the 2026 Graduate Research Fellowship Program awards.
The NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program is a competitive program that supports graduate students in research-based master’s and doctoral degrees in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields. This recognition provides financial support to promising scholars pursuing advanced study at accredited U.S. institutions.
This year, the foundation awarded a total of 2,599 fellowships from more than 14,000 applicants nationwide. Each fellowship offers three years of funding over five years, including an annual stipend of $37,000 and a cost-of-education allowance of $16,000 accepted by graduate institutions instead of tuition and fees.
The University of Pittsburgh’s twelve awardees represent several schools and disciplines: Casey Cargill (Bioengineering), Chapin Czarnecki (Ecology), Sophia Freemyer (Environmental Engineering), Aragya Goyal (Robotics), César Guerra-Solano (Natural Language Processing), Mary McGrory (Environmental Science), Emma Moran (Artificial Intelligence), Santiago Rivero (Developmental Biology), Ritesh Shrivastav and Vanshika Singh (Biomedical Engineering), Allison Brewster Suddaby (Microbial Biology), and Jocelyn Whalen (Systems and Molecular Biology). This marks an increase from seven Pitt winners in the previous year.
In addition to the fellows, six Pitt students received honorable mentions: Sadie Evanov, Spencer Freeman, Jack Hall, Sead Niksic, Kathryn Ruppert, and Dylan Wells. These recognitions highlight achievements across life sciences, engineering disciplines, computer science fields such as computer vision and natural language processing as well as physics specialties.
The selection underscores continued success for Pitt’s graduate programs in STEM fields. The increase in recipients compared to last year suggests growing recognition for student research at the university.
