UCLA Engineering Students Receive 2024 NSF Graduate Research Fellowships

Four current UCLA Samueli School of Engineering graduate students and seven alumni have received the National Science Foundation’s 2024 Graduate Research Fellowship.

The NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) awards fellowships to outstanding students pursuing full-time research-based master’s and doctoral degrees at accredited U.S.-based institutions in NSF-supported science, technology, engineering and mathematics disciplines.

Since its inception in 1952, the GRFP has funded more than 70,000 fellowships. The three-year fellowship program includes a $37,000 annual stipend and an additional $16,000 for tuition and fees. Awardees have gone on to become lifelong learners and leaders in their field who make monumental contributions to education, industry and research.

Following is a brief overview of the 2024 UCLA Samueli NSF Fellows:

Michael Angelis
Civil Engineering (Ph.D.)

• Research Interests: Coastal flooding and swash zone physics using computational fluid dynamics
• Faculty Advisor: Timu Gallien, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering
• Undergraduate Institution: UCLA (2022)

Jonathan Gray
Aerospace Engineering (Ph.D.)

• Research Interests: Characterizing mechanical performance and degradation of novel and advanced materials through experiment, analysis and simulation.
• Faculty Advisor: Lihua Jin, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering
• Undergraduate Institution: Northeastern University (2016)

Alan Levinson
Bioengineering (Ph.D.)

• Research Interests: In-vitro tissue engineering approaches for modeling human physiology and disease
• Faculty Advisor: Neil Lin, assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, and of bioengineering
• Undergraduate Institution: University of Washington (2023)

Corinne Smith
Bioengineering (Ph.D.)

• Research Interests: Engineering high efficiency muscle cell cultures for cultured meat production
• Faculty Advisors: Amy Rowat
• Undergraduate Institution: University of Cincinnati (2022)

Also selected to receive a fellowship is UCLA Samueli computer science recent graduate Daniel Liu, who declined the fellowship in pursuit of a career in industry following his graduation.

Six additional UCLA Samueli alumni have received the 2024 NSF Graduate Research Fellowship for graduate studies in other universities: Justin Tso, Johns Hopkins University; Siddharth Somasundaram, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Allison Chen, Princeton University; George Colaco, UC Santa Cruz; Han Chen, UC San Francisco; and Miranda Diaz-Infante, University of Massachusetts Amherst.