Of the 2,500 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships awarded this academic year, 17 winners were Gator engineers from the University of Florida’s Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering. The students — and recent graduates — were selected because of their exemplary work and contributions to their respective departments.
The NSF fellowships recognize outstanding graduate students from across the country in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields. Recipients are identified as high-potential, early-career scientists and engineers.
BME
The alumni recipient conducted undergraduate research at UF Biomedical Engineering, later spending two years at Massachusetts General Hospital.
Ganti is a first-year Ph.D. student conducting cancer-immunotherapy research under the guidance of Carlos Rinaldi-Ramos.
Meyler is recognized for her work in musculoskeletal tissue engineering and mechanobiology.
Rodriguez conducted undergraduate research with Ruogu Fang, Ph.D., in the SMILE Lab.
ChE
Haensgen is a first-year chemical engineering doctoral student in the Abil lab.
Scutero graduated this spring with a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering and a minor in biomolecular engineering.
ECE
Vann is a first-year PhD student in Volker Sorger’s, Ph.D., Photonics Lab. His research focuses on silicon photonics, Fourier optics and solid-state physics applications.
EEd
Matheus Kunzler Maldaner is a second-year master’s student in the Artificial Intelligence Systems program.
ISE
Yang is pursuing a doctorate specializing in human factors engineering and computational biomechanics.
MAE
Hole, a first-year graduate student, is focusing on printing methods and material systems for organic synthetic tissues at the Florida Additive Manufacturing and Systems Integration Laboratory.
Lawrence is a graduate student in the Neuromechanics of Mobility Lab, where he designs protocols for capturing and analyzing movements.
Meler is a first-year Ph.D. candidate in the KIM Space Lab, where he explores heat transfer in two-phase cryogenic systems.
Rubin recently graduated magna cum laude with honors. At UF, he led a team of undergraduate students in the Fluids and Adaptive Structures (FASt) Lab.
Yates is a fourth-year undergraduate student in MAEs’s Fluids and Adaptive Structures (FASt) Lab, focused on adaptive and multi-stable structures.
MSE/Nuclear
LaVopa graduated and will start as a materials science and engineering doctoral student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign this fall.
In addition to becoming an NSF Graduate Research Fellow, Rigsby became a fellow of the Rickover Fellowship Program this year.
During her time at UF, Xue conducted research on thin-film solar cells and 2D materials for flexible electronics.