Biology Graduate Students and Alumni Awarded NSF Graduate Research Fellowships

The awardees and honorable mentions for the 2021 NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) competition were recently posted and one Biology graduate student and one Biology undergraduate alum were among the students funded. Our current grad student winner is Maria Ingersoll. Maria is studying the

molecular basis of the stress and immune responses in cnidaria (coral and anemones). She is completing her PhD in Cellular and Molecular Biology in the labs of Tom Gilmore and Sarah Davies, where she is linking single-molecule studies of the transcription factor NF-kB to large-scale, environmentally relevant datasets on coral bleaching. According to Maria, in lab she mostly spends her time playing with sea anemone larvae.

Our alum winner is Cheta Siletti (CAS ’16) who is pursuing her graduate studies at University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Also receiving an Honorable Mention for her submission is Kathryn Atherton, a graduate student in BU’s Bioinformatics program.

Congratulations to the awardees and honorable mentions on your hard work and this well-deserved honor.