2026 APAM Graduate Research Fellowship & Award Winners

Several APAM majors and alumni were recently named recipients of the prestigious National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program (NSF GRFP) which recognizes outstanding graduate students pursuing research-based master’s and doctoral degrees in STEM fields. This year’s honorees include Karina Dovgodko SEAS’25 and Szymon Gustav Snoeck SEAS’26 in Applied Mathematics; Ari Willner SEAS’24 and Andrew Yang SEAS’25 in Applied Physics; and Kaylynn Chen SEAS’24 in Materials Science.

Abdullah Hyder, a PhD candidate in plasma physics, was awarded the Department of Energy’s Office of Science Graduate Student Research (SCGSR) fellowship. The program gives PhD candidates the opportunity to travel to and collaborate with a Department of Energy national laboratory. Building on his work with Professor Elizabeth Paul, he will collaborate with Dr. Jeff Larson, an expert in derivative-free optimization, at Argonne National Laboratory (ANL). He will work to optimize the shear Alfvén continua of stellarators, targeting the reduction of key gaps to suppress Alfvénic instabilities. Abdullah will be at ANL for the Fall 2026 semester.

Dayoung Gloria Lee, a PhD candidate in Oleg Gang’s group, was named an MRS Silver Winner and received the Arthur Nowick Graduate Student Award for her research, “Three-Dimensional Mesoscale Patterning within Nanoscale Lattice Organizations,” which she presented at the 2026 MRS Spring Meeting.