Second-year CIERA graduate student Beverly Lowell was awarded the National Science Foundation (NSF) graduate fellowship for the upcoming year and received the Illinois Space Grant Consortium (ISGC) fellowship this year for outstanding research in the field of astronomy. Beverly works with Professor Sasha Tchekhovskoy.
“It is an enormous honor to be selected, considering the NSF GRFP attracts an amazing pool of graduate students from across the country,” said Lowell. “I was downright shocked when I received the offer. The fellowship will give me time for collaboration and outreach, and enable me to work on other exciting side projects related to accreting black holes and the physics of relativistic jets.”
Both programs recognize and support outstanding graduate students in NSF-supported science. The NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) works to ensure the vitality of the human resource base of science and engineering in the United States and reinforces its diversity.
The NSF fellowship is competitive, and has a history of selecting recipients who go on to achieve high levels of success in their future academic and professional careers.
The fellowship will provide Lowell a three-year stipend, as well as an allowance for tuition and fees. The program gives opportunities for international research and professional development, and the freedom to conduct research at any accredited U.S. institution of graduate education.
“We ultimately want to connect the physics of neutron star mergers with the observed emission from these events. I simulate neutron star postmerger environments, where the remnant accretes gas and ejects material into its environment. My main goal is to implement accurate radiation into our group’s GPU-accelerated postmerger code, H-AMR, to determine the composition of the outflows.”
In addition to the NSF fellowship, Lowell received support for a quarter of research through the 2019-2020 academic year as an ISGC fellow. The ISGC has been a part of NASA’s National Space Grant College and Fellowship Program since its creation in 1989, and continually strives to positively influence and support students in the pursuit of space sciences and aerospace engineering careers.
“Part of the NSF fellowship is its emphasis on ‘broader impacts.’ As a former community college student, I hope to spend my graduate career working with students from similar backgrounds, who otherwise may not have access to an institution like Northwestern.”
Congratulations Beverly!
Learn more about the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program and the Illinois Space Grant Consortium Graduate Fellowship Program.