UCLA Engineering Students Receive 2021 NSF Graduate Fellowships

Five UCLA Samueli students have received the prestigious 2021 Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation.

The recipients are 2021 bachelor’s degree graduates Vinya Bhuvan, Jeonghyun Lee and Emi Zeger, as well as current graduate students Elvis Nunez and Marie Payne. Each student will receive an annual stipend of $34,000 and additional $12,000 for tuition and fees.

The three-year fellowship program recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics disciplines who are pursuing research-based master’s and doctoral degrees at accredited U.S. institutions.

Below is a brief overview of the UCLA Samueli 2021 NSF Fellows:

Vinya Bhuvan

Undergraduate major: Chemical Engineering (B.S.)
Research interests: Synthetic biology, immunotherapy, biomaterials
Faculty Advisor: Yvonne Chen
Future Graduate Institution: University of Texas at Austin

Jeonghyun Lee

Undergraduate major: Civil Engineering (B.S.)
Research interests: Seismic risk quantification with a focus on community resilience, increasing public accessibility to seismic retrofits
Faculty Advisors: Henry Burton and Scott Brandenberg
Future Graduate Institution: Stanford University

Elvis Nunez

Graduate degree program: Electrical and Computer Engineering 
Research interests: Mathematics of deep learning; interpretable machine learning; geometry-based machine learning for functional data and shape analysis
Faculty Advisors: Shantanu Joshi and Fabien Scalzo
Undergraduate Institution: Brown University 

Marie Payne

Graduate degree program: Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
Research interests: Engineering physiological culture devices to generate functional biological tissues and developing artificial Intelligence (AI) imaging tools for learning tissue properties
Faculty Advisor: Neil Lin
Undergraduate Institution: Stanford University

Emi Zeger

Departmental Scholar Program: Electrical Engineering (B.S. and M.S.) and Mathematics (B.S.)
Research interests: Signals and systems, etc.
Undergraduate faculty advisor: Chandrashekhar Joshi
Future Graduate Institution: Stanford University

In addition, three UCLA engineering alumni have received NSF Graduate Research Fellowships for 2021 — Jaron Mink, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Sidney Poon, UC Berkeley; and Simon Rufer, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Sarah Wang and Chloe Slayter contributed to this story

* No photo available for Zeger.