On Monday, April 21st, The Graduate School (TGS) of Northwestern University announced that Nabeel Rehemtulla was one of only eight students awarded a Presidential Fellowship for 2025. Funded by the University President and awarded by TGS, the Presidential Fellowship is Northwestern’s most prestigious fellowship. This fellowship honors students who demonstrate exceptional intellectual and creative talent and the potential for significant leadership. It includes a stipend, tuition coverage, research funding, and travel grants.
“It’s a great honor to be awarded the Presidential Fellowship,” says Rehemtulla. “Because my work is interdisciplinary at its core, it can sometimes feel as though it is compromised by not focusing enough on one particular area. Recognition through the Presidential Fellowship, however, shows that incorporating interdisciplinarity actually makes it much stronger.”
Nabeel’s research centers on building cutting-edge AI tools to advance studies of supernovae – the spectacular, explosive deaths of stars. Although they mark the end of a star’s life, supernovae also trigger the birth of new generations of stars and accompanying planets enriched with new elements, many of which are elements that pervade our daily lives. Nabeel has developed a state-of-the-art AI tool which uniquely identifies new supernovae in astronomical images in real time. Upon detecting an event, Nabeel’s algorithm commands telescopes across the globe to quickly conduct additional, more detailed observations. These observations help Nabeel link the explosion we observe with the star that it came from, a task which has remained challenging for decades. This link helps us better understand the contributions of supernovae to the present-day Universe as factories for life-critical elements and as key pillars in the stellar circle of life.
Before attending Northwestern, Nabeel obtained a BS from the University of Michigan in Astronomy & Astrophysics. Nabeel is dedicated to producing effective and exciting visualizations that bring his research to broad audiences and to serving his religious community through leadership roles in its professional and student networks. Nabeel’s research has been supported by two NASA Illinois Space Grant Consortium Graduate Fellowships.
“This would not have been possible without a great deal of support in CIERA and at home from the Miller research group and my loved ones – and a very special shoutout to CIERA member Jillian Rastinejad who won this award last year and spent numerous hours helping me prepare my application.”
Nabeel Rehemtulla is an astronomy PhD candidate in the Department of Physics and Astronomy in the Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences and a member of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research and Exploration in Astrophysics (CIERA). He is advised by Professor Adam Miller.