Six students connected to UC Santa Barbara’s Chemical Engineering Department are among the nearly thirty students affiliated with The Robert Mehrabian College of Engineering (COE) to receive the National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship, one of the most competitive honors in STEM. 

 

The NSF awarded more than 2,500 fellowships for the 2026-27 academic year from nearly 14,000 applicants. The program provides three years of financial support over a five-year period, including a $37,000 annual stipend and a $16,000 cost-of-education annual allowance, totaling $159,000. 

 

“The NSF GRFP is one of the clearest indicators of future leadership in science and engineering,” said Umesh Mishra, dean of The Robert Mehrabian College of Engineering. “Seeing so many of our students recognized at this level speaks to the culture of innovation, rigor, and collaboration that drives discovery at UC Santa Barbara, both at the graduate and undergraduate levels, and impacts the global economy.”

 

This year’s recipients from COE feature fourteen current students, including chemical engineering undergraduate student Anika Jena, at least eight incoming PhD students, including one who will join the Chemical Engineering Department in the fall, and six recent alumni who are pursuing graduate degrees at other institutions.

 

Jena will pursue her PhD at Stanford University, where she will develop and probe advanced functional polymeric materials for health, sustainability, and human advancement. As an undergraduate researcher at UCSB, Jena studied phase separating membrane-actin network composites and tuned their mechanical properties with then-chemical engineering assistant professor Sho Takatori. Later, she engineered supramolecular architectures by coupling DNA nanotubes to condensates with physics professor Deborah Fygenson.

 

Jena, a 2024 Congressional Goldwater Scholar and a Pi Beta Tau Scholar, explains that the NSF Fellowship will support her research beyond traditional funding constraints. “This fellowship will enable me to freely conduct independent, cross-disciplinary work on self-driven research projects,” she said, indicating possible future research in self-healing, stimuli-responsive, conductive, and biocompatible soft materials.

 

In addition to Jena, four researchers who earned their bachelor’s degrees in chemical engineering at UCSB also received 2026-27 NSF Fellowships: Stephanie Anujarerat, now a biomedical engineering PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University; Marcus Condarcure, now a chemical engineering PhD student at Purdue University; Sofia Rivalta Popescu, now a chemical engineering PhD student at Stanford University; and Anton Semerdjiev, a chemical engineering PhD student at California Institute of Technology.