Brown School of Engineering senior Chandler Stevenson has been awarded a three-year fellowship in the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program (NSF GRFP). Additionally, Sarah Berman ’20, Mageean Brown ’24, Alex Green ’25, Lauren Kramer ’24 and current graduate students Mirelys Carcana Barbosa and Victor Sanchez were tabbed honorable mention candidates for the fellowship.
The NSF GRFP helps ensure the vitality of the human resource base of science and engineering in the United States and reinforces its diversity. The program recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in NSF-supported STEM disciplines who are pursuing research-based master’s and doctoral degrees at accredited United States institutions. NSF Fellows are anticipated to become knowledge experts who can contribute significantly to research, teaching, and innovations in science and engineering. These individuals are crucial to maintaining and advancing the nation’s technological infrastructure and national security as well as contributing to the economic well-being of society at large.
Stevenson is an electrical engineer, with research interests in creating robust communication schemes. He works in collaboration with Professor Kimani Toussaint’s PROBE lab and Professor Chris Rose’s World of Bits group at Brown, as well as serving as the Technical Lead and Co-President of Brown Space Engineering. As a University Meiklejohn Peer Advisor, Stevenson also helps advise a group of first-year students to aid in their navigation of class selection, academic resources and adjustment to life at Brown. He has been a head teaching assistant for ENGN0520 (Electrical Circuits and Signals), teaching assistant for ENGN0040 (Dynamics and Vibrations), and last year completed a summer internship with SpaceX's Starlink. He was also awarded an Amplify Scholarship from the Optica Foundation, which supports Black students and their passion for optics.
After graduating this May, Stevenson will join Blue Origin as a graduate summer intern before beginning a Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering at Princeton in the fall.
Berman is a current second year Ph.D. student in Northwestern’s Materials Science and Engineering Department. At Brown, she concentrated in materials science and engineering and completed her senior honor’s thesis in Professor Eric Chason’s lab, where she investigated the relationship between thin film deposition parameters and mechanical properties. At Northwestern, Berman is an inaugural member of Assistant Professor David Barton’s lab, where she focuses on the development of optimized integrated photonic devices and material platforms that can integrate into existing systems to enable faster data switching speeds, enhanced sensing capabilities, and low-energy interconnects for data centers and quantum systems. Her work spans material growth, characterization, device fabrication, and optical testing. Before Northwestern, Berman spent three years as a consultant at the EY-Parthenon Software Strategy group performing diligence and value creation for clients interested in investing in software companies.
Brown is a first year Ph.D. student in the Graduate Aerospace Laboratories at Caltech (GALCIT). This summer, she will begin her research studying environmental fluid dynamics using experimental methods. As an undergraduate at Brown, she conducted research in Assistant Professor Monica Martinez Wilhelmus’ lab. This research focused on designing underwater robots inspired by shrimp locomotion. These bio-inspired designs aim to improve the efficiency and maneuverability of underwater robots compared to conventional approaches. Brown was also a subsystem lead on the Brown Formula Racing Team, where she helped design and weld the chassis of the car.
Green is a senior studying engineering/physics with a strong interest in materials and devices for energy and sustainability. He is a member of Assistant Professor Lucas Caretta’s lab, where he investigates the incorporation of superconducting materials into spintronics through the fabrication of superconducting/magnetic multilayers. Spintronics is an emerging field of technologies that uses the intrinsic spin of electrons to store and transfer information, and has the potential to offer faster, more energy-efficient, and non-volatile computing and memory. He also has conducted research at Columbia and Université Paris-Saclay through summer Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) programs with a similar focus on materials/device fabrication. He serves as the vice president of the Brown Bears National Society of Black Physicists chapter, of which he is a founding member, and was awarded the GEM Fellowship this year, sponsored by 3M Company, where he will work as a graduate summer intern after graduation in May. He will join the electrical engineering Ph.D. cohort at Princeton this fall, where he plans to conduct research on perovskite materials for more efficient solar cell technologies.
Kramer is a first year Ph.D. student in mechanical engineering at Stanford, working in the NanoEnergy lab under the guidance of Professor Hai Wang. Her research investigates the mechanisms of electrical conductivity in carbon nanomaterials. While at Brown, she performed research in Professor Roberto Zenit’s lab focusing on the study of viscoelastic fluids with applications to forest firefighting. As an undergraduate, she spent her summers interning at Argonne National Laboratory, where she contributed to projects focusing on life cycle analysis and biofuel modeling.
Carcana Barbosa is a second year Ph.D. student in Fluids and Thermal Sciences in the School of Engineering at Brown University. She is a member of the Computational Flow Group, advised by Assistant Professor Mauro Rodriguez. Her research combines theory and numerical simulations to study how bubbles behave in soft, heterogeneous viscoelastic materials — especially under extreme, high-strain-rate conditions. This work, which involves finite deformations, bubble dynamics, and fluid-structure interactions, has important applications in understanding tissue damage during certain biomedical procedures. Beyond her research, she is a member of the Graduate Students of Color in STEM and helped establish the Latinx Graduate Collective. Carcana Barbosa earned her bachelor of science degree in Engineering Physics from the University of California, Berkeley in 2023.
Sanchez is a second year Ph.D. student also working with Assistant Professor Mauro Rodriguez in the Fluids and Thermal Sciences group in the School of Engineering. He earned his bachelor of arts in Applied Mathematics with a concentration in computational modeling from California State University, Fullerton in 2023. His current work leverages data-driven techniques to compare numerical simulations to experimental data with the goal of being able to characterize soft, tissue-like materials in the ultra high-strain-rate regime. This work has significant applications ranging from improvements of certain medical procedures to naval applications, which rely heavily on the understanding how these materials behave under extreme conditions. Beyond his research, Sanchez is a member of the Graduate Students of Color in STEM and actively participates in STEM outreach programs back in his hometown of Santa Ana, Calif.
Including Stevenson, 11 Brown University students and alumni in science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields were chosen to receive tuition support and a stipend as promising young STEM leaders.