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Accolades & Honors

12 Pitt students were named to the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program

Cathedral of Learning with lamp sign that reads "University of Pittsburgh: It's Possible at Pitt"

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has named its 2026 class of Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) scholars, and several Pitt students are among the awardees and honorable mentions.

The GRFP is a prestigious program that supports outstanding graduate students pursuing research-based master’s and doctoral degrees in more than 100 NSF-supported STEM fields. This year, the foundation awarded 2,599 fellowships from a pool of more than 14,000 applicants.

These fellowships serve as three years of financial support that can be used over five years at accredited U.S. institutions, including an annual stipend of $37,000 and a cost-of-education allowance of $16,000 that graduate institutions agree to accept in lieu of charging tuition and fees.

This year, Pitt had 12 winners, five more than in 2025. The winners are:

  • Casey Cargill, a graduate student in the Swanson School of Engineering — Engineering: Bioengineering
  • Chapin Czarnecki, a graduate student in the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences — Life Sciences: Ecology
  • Sophia Freemyer, an undergraduate in the Swanson School and David C. Frederick Honors College — Engineering: Environmental and/or Ecological Engineering
  • Aragya Goyal, an undergraduate in the Swanson School and Frederick Honors College — Computer and Information Science and Engineering: robotics
  • César Guerra-Solano, an undergraduate in the School of Computing and Information and Frederick Honors College — Computer and Information Science and Engineering: Natural Language Processing
  • Mary McGrory, an undergraduate student in the Dietrich School and Frederick Honors College — Geosciences: Environmental Science
  • Emma Moran, an undergraduate student in the Dietrich School — Physics and Astronomy: Artificial Intelligence
  • Santiago Rivero, a graduate student in the School of Medicine — Life Sciences: Developmental Biology
  • Ritesh Shrivastav, a graduate student in the Swanson School — Engineering: Biomedical Engineering
  • Vanshika Singh, a graduate student in the Swanson School — Engineering: Biomedical Engineering
  • Allison Brewster Suddaby, a graduate student in the Dietrich School — Life Sciences: Microbial Biology
  • Jocelyn Whalen, a graduate student in the Dietrich School — Life Sciences: Systems and Molecular Biology

The University also had six honorable mentions:

  • Sadie Evanov, an undergraduate student in the Dietrich School — Life Sciences: Ecology
  • Spencer Freeman, an undergraduate student in the Dietrich School — Physics and Astronomy: Condensed Matter Physics
  • Jack Hall, a graduate student in the Swanson School — Engineering: Environmental and/or Ecological Engineering
  • Sead Niksic (ENGR ’23) — Computer and Information Science and Engineering: Computer Vision
  • Kathryn Ruppert, a graduate student in the Dietrich School — Life Sciences: Genetics
  • Dylan Wells, a graduate student in the Dietrich School — Physics and Astronomy: Computationally Intensive Research
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