UO National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellows

The Division of Graduate Studies is proud of its National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellows. This prestigious research fellowship is awarded to outstanding master’s and doctoral students in science, technology, engineering, math, and STEM education disciplines. Fellows are selected on their promise to develop breakthrough research. UO NSF fellows are working on fascinating projects including bee conservation, climate change messaging, the impacts of stress on the skeletal system and much more. Read on to learn about each NSF Fellow and their tremendous achievement and promise.

If you are a graduate student in a qualifying STEM field and want to learn more about this NSF GRF program, click here.

Angelique Allen

Allen seeks to decode the complex visual processing system of octopuses, including their camera-like eyes which are similar to that of humans. She is focused on how octopuses process polarization information, meaning the angle of a light wave relative to the direction of its propagation.

Gaby Bailey

Bailey studies carbon nanohoops which are new types of carbon nanomaterials with unique optical properties developed in the Jasti Research Group. She is systematically altering the structure of the carbon nanohoop by incorporating other elements like sulfur or nitrogen and studying the effects on the fluorescence emission of these materials.

Savanah Bird

Bird is studying the causes and consequences of African elephant hybridization in the East African Albertine Rift. Using whole genome sequencing and DNA metabarcoding techniques, her goal is to better understand what hybridization means for the future of these endangered species and how the field of conservation should view hybridization more broadly.

Carla Campos

Campos is investigating potential microbial assembly patterns and possible functions of microbes within the brooding pouch of pipefish.

Hannah Cantrell

Cantrell is studying market integration effects on the skeleton in the Shuar, an Ecuadorian Indigenous population who participate in the Shuar Health and Life History Project, co-directed by her UO advisor, Dr. Josh Snodgrass. Using biomarkers and bone turnover markers, Hannah is interested in how health, inequity, and lifestyle factors influence the skeleton and works at the intersection of skeletal and dental biology, human biology, and evolutionary medicine.

Gabrielle Coffing

Coffing is a computational biologist studying octopus evolution. She assembled a high-quality genome of the California two-spot octopus which she is using to examine the evolution of sex chromosomes in cephalopods.

Dara Craig

Craig studies how coastal co-management affects cultural health and mauri (life force) in Aotearoa New Zealand, through the lens and practice of community engagement. As a member of the Glacier Lab and a non-Indigenous scholar, her research promotes living oceans and climate justice, with focuses on marine spatial planning, settler colonial studies, and supporting Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination.

Jarod Forer

Forer is investigating how fluid microcirculation can serve as a target for new therapeutic approaches to tendon injury and disease, with an emphasis on translation to the clinical level. He is a member of the Willett Lab at the Knight Campus and the Hahn Lab in the Bowerman Sports Science Center.

Rebecca Hayes

Hayes studies the biogeography of wild bees and their gut microbiomes. She uses machine learning and Bayesian hierarchical modeling to understand spatial patterns and drivers of variation in the pollen bees collect and the communities of organisms that live inside their guts.

Justin Krier

Krier is working to better understand what is happening inside “Io,” one of Jupiter’s moons. He is looking at the magnetic relationship between the planet and moon.

Mahindra Mohan Kumar

Kumar's research investigates how and why chronically underfunded mobile crisis response programs have been asked to solve systemic issues such as houselessness. His research is largely inspired by his most recent ethnographic project on case managers at a homeless services organization navigating the provision of social welfare for the unhoused during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Katya Podkovyroff Lewis

Lewis is focused on paleoecology and paleoclimate insights in lake sediments to predict ecosystems and vegetative community changes. Her research will serve as a means for understanding and reconstructing paleoenvironments that might provide insight to climate change impacts on communities that are facing these challenges.

Christopher Machle

Machle is studying how puberty changes the brain. He is specifically focused on how the coordinated release of pubertal hormones impacts the development of white matter (WM), which serves as the structural connections between neurons.

Rose McDonald

McDonald is reconstructing pollinator habitats in managed forests and, within that system, determining the underlying drivers of pathogen spread among bee communities.

Kaylee Meyers

Meyers studies biosensors and bioelectronics which involves the development of implantable and wearable sensing platforms. Her work focuses on the engineering of sensors that fully degrade within the body after their functional lifetime is complete; such sensors could help address complications in orthopedics, sports medicine, and more.

Nicolette Molina

Molina explores how oppression, including discrimination and other forms of inequity, interact with personal factors to increase risk for suicidal thoughts and behaviors among pregnant and postpartum people. Through her work, she aims to leverage a social justice approach to foster environments where life feels worth living for marginalized communities.

Anastasia Browning O'Hagan

O'Hagan is studying person-to-person variation in how people interpret, evaluate, and decide whether to accept or reject messaging about climate change. Her research aims to take the first step toward a more comprehensive model of message reception that can be translated into effective climate change communications.

Kalika Pai

Pai is studying RNA (focusing on a long non-coding RNA related to heart disease) using single-molecule techniques. These techniques allow us to gain information about structure of the RNA, as well dynamic fluctuations that occur and interactions with other relevant biological molecules.

Nicolas Daniel Puentes

Puentes is conducting computational modeling of multiferroic superlattices. Multiferroics are materials that have strong magnetoelectric coupling, enabling control of electrical (magnetic) properties with magnetic (electric) fields. Developments in multiferroic research would promote significant technological advancements.

Maryn Sanders

Sanders is a geomorphologist–someone who studies the surface of the Earth and how it changes over time–and her research focus is on debris flows, which are landslides that run out long distances from where they fail. She’s working in the Columbia River Gorge and Southeast Alaska to better understand the conditions necessary to initiate these events in regions where they occur annually and pose high risk to rural and tribal communities.

Zach Schroeder

Schroeder is a social psychologist who uses language data to research interpersonal perception and "thought-feeling accuracy" - how good we are at knowing what’s going on inside other people’s minds. He applies this research to understanding how educators actively monitor their students’ learning and how we perceive one another during conflict on social media.

David Small

Small is focused on large subduction zone earthquake and tsunami inundation modeling to determine coastal hazards more accurately as well as understand historical earthquakes. He has primarily studied the Cascadia Subduction Zone and is highly motivated in constraining what the last great Cascadia earthquake might have looked like through constraining synthetic earthquake models with known geologic clues attributed to this event.