Lily Gebhart '25 was awarded both a "Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship" (DOE CSGF) and a "National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship" (NSF GRF), and will be pursuing the DOE CSGF which will fund her PhD research work at Stanford as well as an internship at a national laboratory to further her thesis research.
Why did you choose to apply for these awards?
I applied for the NSF GRFP and DOE CSGF to support my graduate research and give me more freedom in what I can study throughout my PhD!
Briefly describe the work you will be doing on your fellowship.
Under the DOE CSGF, I will be working with Dr. Andrea Goldstein-Piekarski at Stanford to model how the sleep of individuals with comorbid insomnia and psychiatric disorders differs from healthy individuals. I will also be investigating the mechanisms of anesthesia as a potential treatment for the sleep-related symptoms of depression and PTSD from a computational perspective.
What are you most looking forward to during your time as a fellow?
It is hard to say what I'm most excited about! In the near future, I am looking forward to meeting the rest of my DOE CSGF cohort at a program review conference this summer in Washington D.C. and using the professional development funding from the DOE CSGF to begin building my interdisciplinary network by attending conferences in computational neuroscience, high performance computing, and biological psychiatry in the next year. I am also thrilled about the unique opportunity the DOE CSGF grants me to complete an internship at a national laboratory the summer after the second year of my PhD, which will give me access to incredible computational resources to further investigate questions relevant to my thesis research!
How have your experiences at Oxy prepared you to apply for this award?
My time at 17勛圖 definitely helped prepare me for applying to this award! Dan Snowden-Ifft, Carmel Levitan, and Justin Li, my research mentors at 17勛圖, and Jennifer Locke, Amanda Zellmer, Doug Duquette, Raul Navarro, and Stephanie Nelli, additional mentors of mine, gave me both the experience and support I needed to build a strong application. The curriculum flexibility at OXY also allowed me to chase my interests, wherever they took me, and resulted in a unique interdisciplinary background that I have found to be extraordinarily helpful in my PhD so far.
What advice would you give future applicants about the application process?
Apply, apply, apply! Even if you don't feel ready, applying to fellowships teaches you so much about yourself and really forces you to think critically about your interests. The more practice you have applying, the more prepared you will be in future opportunities you apply for. A lot of fellowship writing is also about storytelling, whether it is in your research proposal or personal statement. So, it is important to have strong ideas but also to be able to convey them clearly and memorably. Lastly, have fun with it! Use applying to fellowships as an opportunity to learn something new - about yourself or topics you're interested in!