DOE's Office of Science Graduate Student Research Program Selects 86 Outstanding U.S. Graduate Students
April 26, 2024
Editor's note: The following news release was issued by the U.S. Department of Energy. Thirteen of the awardees will be conducting research at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory.
The Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Office of Science has selected 86 graduate students representing 31 states and Puerto Rico for the Office of Science Graduate Student Research (SCGSR) program’s 2023 Solicitation 2 cycle. Through world-class training and access to state-of-the-art facilities and resources at DOE national laboratories, SCGSR prepares graduate students to enter jobs of critical importance to the DOE mission and secures our national position at the forefront of discovery and innovation.
“The Graduate Student Research program is a unique opportunity for graduate students to complete their PhD training with teams of world-class experts aiming to answer some of the most challenging problems in fundamental science,” said Harriet Kung, Acting Director of the DOE Office of Science. “Gaining access to cutting edge tools for scientific discovery at DOE national laboratories will be instrumental in preparing the next generation of scientific leaders.”
Awardees were selected from a diverse pool of graduate applicants from institutions around the country. Selection was based on merit review by external scientific experts. Since 2014, the SCGSR program has provided more than 1150 U.S. graduate awardees from 165 universities with supplemental funds to conduct part of their thesis research at a host DOE laboratory in collaboration with a DOE laboratory scientist. In this cohort, more than 31% of SCGSR awardees are women, about 16% of the awardees attend Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs), and 13% are from institutions in jurisdictions that are part of the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR).
SCGSR awardees work on research projects of significant importance to the Office of Science mission that address critical energy, environmental, and nuclear challenges at national and international scales. Projects in this cohort span seven Office of Science research programs. Awards were made through the SCGSR program’s first of two annual solicitation cycles for FY 2023.
Applications for the ongoing 2024 Solicitation 1 cycle are due 5:00pm EST, May 1, 2024. Graduate students currently pursuing Ph.D. degrees in areas of physics, chemistry, material sciences, biology (non-medical), geology, planetary sciences, mathematics, engineering, computer or computational sciences, or specific areas of environmental sciences that are aligned with the mission of the Office of Science are eligible to apply to the SCGSR program. The research projects are expected to advance the graduate awardees’ overall doctoral research and training while providing access to the expertise, resources, and capabilities available at the DOE national laboratories. The award cohort from the 2024 Solicitation 1 cycle is expected to be announced around September 2024.
A list of the 86 awardees, their institutions, host DOE laboratory/facility, and priority research areas of projects can be found here.
The Brookhaven Lab awardees, their current graduate research institutions, and research areas are:
- Nathan Borak, Yale University, Nuclear Theory
- Liam Brodie, Washington University in St. Louis, Nuclear Structure and Nuclear Astrophysics
- Caleb Broodo, University of Houston, Heavy Ion Nuclear Physics
- Stasiu Thomas Chyczewski, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Microelectronics
- Austin William Dick, Stony Brook University, Basic Science for Clean Energy and Decarbonization
- Jonathan Goettsch, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, Basic Science for Advanced Manufacturing
- Ethan Iaia, The University of Alabama, Basic Science for Clean Energy and Decarbonization
- Louis Young Kirkley, Penn State University Park, Basic Science for Advanced Manufacturing
- Colleen Lindenau, Drexel University, Instruments R&D for Neutron and X-Ray Facilities
- Rachel Elizabeth Siegel, University of California-Davis, Basic Science for Clean Energy and Decarbonization
- Sophia TenHuisen, Harvard University, Chemical and Materials Sciences for Quantum Information Science (QIS)
- Jinu Thomas, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Data and Computational Sciences for Materials and Chemical Sciences
- Charles Edward Wilson, University of New Hampshire, Basic Science for Clean Energy and Decarbonization
More information on SCGSR can be found here.
Brookhaven National Laboratory is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy. The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit science.energy.gov.
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2024-21854 | INT/EXT | Newsroom
