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The day the National Science Foundation announced the winners of its prestigious Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) awards, ������ý senior Eric Talbott had no idea it was happening.

Not until he randomly woke up, hours before the sun rose, to check his phone, only to see a message saying the results had been released.

“Next thing I know, it’s like 4 in the morning, and I’m jumping around my room in excitement and then texting my professors — who, luckily, weren’t up,” said Talbott, who studies chemistry.

The NSF GRFP is a highly competitive grant that supports graduate students who are planning on pursuing full-time, research-based academic careers in STEM fields or education. It provides three years’ worth of annual $37,000 stipends for research, on top of additional funding for tuition.

This year, two ������ý students received GRFP awards: Talbott and Marcis Scroger, a graduate student studying neuroscience.

“I’m only one of 30 within the neuroscience field. Being one of 30 across the entire country is really hard to wrap my head around,” Scroger said. “But I’m just thankful for all the people at ������ý that have supported me for the past six years of being here.”

While Talbott woke early and could hardly fall back asleep, Scroger, on the other hand, was seemingly the last person to find out about the announcement. Having stayed up the night before checking and rechecking for results, he decided to come into the lab later than usual the next day.

His mentor, Florence Varodayan, an assistant professor of psychology, chased him down to have him check his account.

“I was the one that was late to the game in terms of finding out that I had won the award,” he recalled.

Researchers from year one

The project that won Talbott a GRFP grant concerns photocatalysts, where chemists use the light around them — from sunlight to artificial LED strips — to jumpstart chemical reactions.

Photochemistry can create drug molecules, for example, but there’s a catch. It results in dual molecules that might look the same, but can cause widely varied results depending on which is used. Moreover, once molecules collide, there’s usually no telling where they’ll go or what else they’ll hit.

At the heart of Talbott’s proposal is figuring out how to best design and control these reactions, as improving the selectivity in this process could streamline drug manufacturing.

“I want to spend my Ph.D. focusing on those kinds of reactions: design the reaction itself and do some really cool, new, innovative chemistry,” he said, “but also [see] what stories the process of that reaction actually happening can tell us about designing the next reaction.”

Talbott’s love for chemistry has many roots. After dissecting a pig’s heart in middle school, he found himself enamored with how nature powered living beings. Growing up on a farm, he was also well aware that animals and plants need the right conditions to thrive.

“I just like to be very hands-on in life, and that’s what chemistry lets me do,” he said. “I’m able to look at a molecule and say, ‘I want to build that. How do I do it?’”

Further sparking Talbott’s interest in chemistry was the University’s First-Year Research Immersion (FRI) Program, where he was placed in the biomedical chemistry stream. FRI, which enables students to conduct research starting freshman year, inspired Talbott to join the lab where he has now worked for three and a half years.

Similarly, Scroger solidified his calling for neuroscience through the FRI program. He had toured ������ý before as a pre-med student thinking of pursuing psychology. But after speaking with an admissions counselor and neuroscience professor about his interests, things finally clicked: Really, it was neuroscience he should be after.

“Ever since that initial conversation, I was gung-ho on ������ý. I enrolled, I was accepted into the First-Year Research Immersion neuroscience stream — which, come full circle, is pretty heavily involved in my NSF GRFP application,” he said.

He credits his FRI mentor, Research Assistant Professor Deborah Kreiss, for “totally changing my perspective of what I wanted my career to look like.”

Scroger, now in his second year as a doctoral student, is interested in mapping out where stress signals like norepinephrine are projected in the brain — and more specifically, how it differs between sexes. Current literature has largely assumed results in male brains were applicable across all sexes, though Scroger said that’s no longer the case.

As a result, how the circuitry works in female brains to respond to stress signals — and how that impacts cognition, decision-making and other behaviors — has never been fully explored.

Scroger’s winning GRFP proposal aims to fill that gap. Say we compare our brains to a map of campus, and our preliminary cortex is the Library Tower, while the infralimbic cortex is Science 1. Researchers know that norepinephrine can land in these regions, but not which room it would go to.

Scroger is trying to figure out which room or floor where projected stress signals are received, because any location can result in a different response, which could eventually shed more light on how to better treat certain behavioral disorders. That process involves creating a big circuit with a single neuron, pipette and wider electrical rig — and breaking into said neuron with a well-calculated pop of air, by mouth.

“I feel very passionately about how science diagnoses and treatment options should be holistic and diverse,” Scroger said. “Instead of being a medical doctor and just having that be true in my practice, as the one to do the research behind how medical doctors lead their course of treatments and are prescribing their medications, I feel like what I’m passionate about can have a bigger impact.”

A highly competitive year

The NSF GRFP typically goes to around 2,000 students nationwide. Out of more than 13,000 applications, only around 16% of them are successful. This year, however, the number of awards given was halved — the lowest number of GRFP recipients in 15 years, .

The process of coming up with a standout proposal wasn’t easy. For Talbott, that looked like early mornings drawing on lab whiteboards and many meetings with his research advisor, John Swierk, associate professor of chemistry, to toss ideas back and forth.

“Getting that initial idea, and then hoping that no one else has done it before, is the hardest part,” he said.

After months of working and waiting, Talbott will attend Princeton University next fall. Scroger will continue to work with Varodayan at ������ý, where he keeps in touch with his FRI mentor, Kreiss, while paying back the guidance he received by mentoring new undergraduates in the neuroscience stream and his own lab.

“Being able to work in a collaborative environment that’s not cutthroat, and emphasizes uplifting each other and trying to see each other succeed, is really special to me,” Scroger said.

Research is not a one-man show, and both Scroger and Talbott found community and inspiration among their fellow researchers, mentors and FRI program.

“You’re surrounded by other people who have the same interests as you, who want to be there 40 hours a week with you,” Talbott said. “You build a community off sharing ideas back and forth.”

The GRFP review process accounts for everything from undergraduate work to current research, according to Scroger. After an exceptionally competitive year, securing the GRFP award is the validation of, in his case, six years and counting of hard work.

“Every decision that you make for yourself, you do because it feels correct, and you’re confident that it has a bigger purpose,” Scroger said. “But getting the NSF award really put everything into perspective: I’ve always known that ������ý was my home.”