Six Chemistry Students Win NSF's Graduate Fellowship Research Program Grant

Congratulations to Loren Cardani, Bo Couture, Justine Drappeau, Ellen Irving, Daniel Nakamura, and Leyla Valerio for winning this prestigious grant, which provides an annual stipend and three years of financial support.

NSF reviewers choose proposals with (1) intellectual merit, such as whether the project will advance the field and is well-thought out, (2) and broader impact, such as whether the project could improve societal well-being, national economic status, or national security.

The students perform research with several faculty.

Loren Cardani is in the Nilsson group, which focuses on understanding what drives the peptide self-assembly that is characteristic of amyloid pathologies such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, type 2 diabetes, and prion encephalopathies.

Leyla Valerio is part of the Matson Lab group, which focuses on synthetic inorganic chemistry and application of first-row transition metal complexes to solve a variety of industrial, environmental and biological problems.

Both Bo Couture and Ellen Irving are part of Rudi Fasan’s lab, which investigates areas in bioorganic chemistry, chemical biology, and biomolecular engineering and evolution.

Justine Drappeau is a recent graduate, but she was part of Alison Frontier’s lab, which researches novel pericyclic reactions, cationic rearrangements and stereoselective cyclization cascades, and their application to complex molecule synthesis.

Daniel Nakamura is part of the Kennedy Lab group, which focuses on the development of sustainable chemo-, regio-, and stereoselective catalytic methods for the valorization of chemical feedstock to produce useful building blocks and materials for applications in chemical synthesis.

Congratulations again to these six students!