NSF Graduate Research Fellow Recipients

The National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellows Program (GRFP) is one of the oldest graduate fellowships in the United States that supports STEM students. Recipients are selected for their outstanding work in science, technology, engineering, or math fields.

The five-year fellowship provides three years of financial support in the form of an annual stipend of $34,000 and a $12,000 cost of education allowance for tuition and fees paid to the institution. They have opportunities for international research and professional development and have the freedom to conduct their own research.

The 2021 NSF Graduate Research Fellows with ties to the Johns Hopkins Institute for NanoBioTechnology are Habben Desta and Siddharth Iyer. Desta is a chemical and biomolecular engineering PhD student in the lab of Konstantinos Konstantopoulos, INBT core faculty member. She received her bachelor of science degree in nanoscale engineering from SUNY Polytechnic Institute. Desta also participated in INBT’s NSF Research Experience for Undergraduates Program in the summer of 2018 when she was an undergraduate student. Siddharth Iyer, now a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, performed research in the lab of Hai-Quan Mao, INBT associate director and core faculty member. Iyer was awarded the fellowship for his proposal for a screening tool to study and manipulate brain aging in vivo using expansion sequencing and multiplexed Cre-dependent recombination.