Weill Cornell Graduate School congratulates our current graduate students who received award offers and
honorable mention recognition in the 2023 National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship
Program!
Tzippora Chwat-Edelstein | Honorable Mention | BCMB PhD Program | Mentored by Dr. Xiaolan Zhao at
Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center | “SUMO E3 auto-sumoylation in substrate selection and pathway
regulation”
Victoria Jordan | Award Accepted | Tri-I Chemical Biology PhD Program | Mentored by Dr. Heeseon An at
Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center | “Studying ubiquitin Ser57 phosphorylation as a regulator of neuronal
differentiation”
Benjamin Kaminow | Award Accepted | Tri-I Computational Biology & Medicine PhD Program | Mentored by
Dr. John Chodera at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center | “Development of structure-enabled machine
learning models for protein-ligand binding affinity prediction”
Divya Koyyalagunta | Award Accepted | Tri-I Computational Biology PhD Program | Mentored by Dr. Quaid
Morris at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center | “Interpretable Machine Learning for Simultaneous
Inference of Phylogeny and Migration”
Linda Ma | Award Accepted | Computational Biology MS Program | Mentored by Dr. Jonathan Victor at Weill
Cornell Medicine | “Representation of neural activity as walks in curved spaces”
Christopher Nieves-Escobar | Award Accepted | Tri-I Chemical Biology PhD Program | Mentored by Dr.
Derek Tan at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center | “Photoredox-catalyzed synthesis of 3-oxetanols and 3-
azetidinols from carboxylic acids”
Austin Varela | Award Accepted | Computational Biology MS Program, Incoming Tri-I Computational Biology
& Medicine PhD Program | Mentored by Dr. Ashley Laughney at Weill Cornell Medicine | “Using generative
modeling to understand heterogeneous patterns of cellular communication from scRNA-seq data"