2026 NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Recipient and Honorable Mentions

Among the announced awardees and honorable mentions of the 2026 NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) are three Biology students. Jules Fillion, an incoming Biology PhD student of the Marlow Lab, was awarded with a 3-year graduate research fellowship. Deirdre Boyer, a Biology PhD Student in the Henderson Lab, and Brendan Kosztyo, an MCBB PhD Student in the Wunderlich Lab, received honorable mentions.

Jules studies carbon cycling at seafloor methane seeps, where microbes consume much of the methane that may otherwise escape to the atmosphere. These microbial communities form carbonate minerals that remain on the seafloor for millions of years, preserving chemical signatures of their activity that can help reconstruct past environments and inform the search for life beyond Earth. Jules is developing a microfluidic platform as a diagnostic tool for biosignature detection, designed to constrain rates of biomineralization under controlled hydrodynamic and geochemical conditions. Jules is broadly interested in the metabolic capabilities of single-celled organisms that live at the energetic limits of life, their evolutionary adaptations to physical extremes, and their relationship to their environment.

Brendan is a first year MCBB PhD student who recently joined the Wunderlich Lab, which studies how shadow enhancers in Drosophila confer robustness to gene expression in developmental and immune processes. Shadow enhancers are cis-regulatory elements that control expression of the same gene and are required to drive normal development,buffering against the effects of mutations and environmental stress. Currently, Brendan is using computational analysis to study how perturbations to transcription factors and their corresponding binding sites in shadow enhancers affect gene expression in development. One particularly sensitive process is craniofacial development. Brendan aims to investigate how epigenetic factors contribute to the patterning and migration of neural crest cells during craniofacial development.

Deirdre is a first-year Biology PhD student in the Henderson lab, which focuses on HIV. She is interested in how T cell activation states impact infection and latent virus generation.

Congratulations to the awardee and honorable mentions on your hard work and on this well-deserved honor!