Two members of the Kellogg community, a doctoral student and a graduating senior, have received prestigious National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program (NSF-GRFP) awards. Three other Kellogg-affiliated students and alumni received honorable mentions in the national competition.

The five-year fellowships recognize and support outstanding graduate and graduating undergraduate students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, and social science disciplines who are pursuing research-based degrees. 

Doctoral student affiliate Nicholas Ames (anthropology) will use his NSF-GRFP award to continue his study of early 19th- and early 20th-century Irish immigration to the United States.

“This includes studying the materiality of household structures and composition of rural communities in Ireland, as well as tracing individuals from these communities as they immigrated to the US and rebuilt and integrated their former communities into the context of urban America,” says Ames.

He is conducting research in County Mayo and County Galway in western Ireland as well as in several US communities with significant Irish immigrant populations.

“I am also beginning to think about rural community development and its impact on shaping immigration patterns in a more pan-European sense by expanding an element of this research into a community in southern Italy,” he says. As he does, he will benefit from the advice of Faculty Fellow Maurizio Albahari, a member of his dissertation committee.

Kellogg International Scholar Sreeaahul Kancherla ’17 (economics and honors mathematics), one of only 29 winners nationwide in economics, will take the NSF fellowship and its stipend to a PhD program at the University of California, Berkeley, where he plans to focus on labor and public economics.

“I’m extremely excited to study public economics at Berkeley—one of the world’s preeminent economics departments,” says Kancherla.

“My passion is the role of public policy in devising strategies to alleviate poverty. At this stage, I have broad interests in education, social insurance, and healthcare.”

As a member of the Kellogg International Scholars Program, Kancherla is the student leader on Faculty Fellow Jeffrey Bergstrand’s research team, which is categorizing free trade agreements and their effects in a massive database. Simultaneously, in Notre Dame’s Wilson-Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities (LEO), Kancherla has immersed himself in projects dealing with healthcare, early childhood education, community college persistence, the health impacts of affordable senior housing, and job mentoring. (See profile of Kancherla here.)

PhD Fellow Paul Friesen (political science), Doctoral Student Affiliate Paige Ambord (sociology), and Kellogg International Scholar Luke Pardue ’14 (economics) earned honorable mentions in the competition. Overall, 33 Notre Dame students were recognized by the NSF.

The NSF-GRFP provides three years of financial support ($34,000 annual stipend and $12,000 cost-of-education allowance to the graduate institution), as well as opportunities for international research and professional development over the course of the fellowship.

Graduate students interested in applying for external awards should contact the Graduate School’s Office of Grants and Fellowships. Interested undergraduate students should visit the Flatley Center for Undergraduate Scholarly Engagement website.

The Kellogg Institute for International Studies, part of the University of Notre Dame’s new Keough School of Global Affairs, is an interdisciplinary community of scholars and students from across the University and around the world that promotes research, provides educational opportunities, and builds linkages related to two topics critical to our world—democracy and human development.