Three Students Awarded NSF Graduate Research Fellowships

Three students at the UC Irvine Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) have been awarded 2026 fellowships from the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program (NSF GRFP), announced April 13.

The NSF GRFP Fellowship supports fellowships for outstanding graduate students who are pursuing full-time, research-based masters and doctoral degrees in science, technology, engineering or math (STEM), including education.

NSF awarded 2,500 Graduate Research Fellowships out of a “highly competitive pool of nearly 14,000 applicants nationwide. Each fellowship provides three years of support over a five-year period. NSF provides a $37,000 stipend and $16,000 Cost of Education allowance each year to cover all tuition and mandatory fees.

The three ICS recipients are John Henry Lain, Diptanshu Sikdar, and Emily Tian.

John Henry Lain was awarded the NSF GRFP fellowship for statistics. Lain is a first-year doctoral candidate at ICS. He earned his undergraduate degree in financial mathematics and statistics at UC Santa Barbara.

During his undergraduate degree, Lain studied statistical methods in public health at the Irvine Summer Institute in Biostatistics and Undergraduate Data Science (ISI-BUDS) in the UC Irvine Statistics department, a summer program similar to a Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU). “The great experience at ISI-BUDS was part of what led me to pursue my PhD at UC Irvine,” said Lain.

Lain’s research explores the use of reinforcement learning to help policymakers make better decisions during infectious disease outbreaks, particularly when there is limited data and significant uncertainty about how the disease will spread or respond to interventions, explained Lain.

“I aim to develop methods that can guide when and where to allocate limited resources and implement mitigation measures in ways that reduce outbreak severity. My focus is on reducing risks associated with existing approaches and ensuring fair allocation of resources, both of which are crucial goals for the responsible use of reinforcement learning in a public health crisis.”

Lain was mentored by Wenzhou Zhou, assistant professor of statistics, and Volodymyr Minin, professor of statistics.

“I am very thankful to all the faculty who have mentored me, as well as to my peers who have supported me. I feel incredibly honored to receive the fellowship.”


Diptanshu Sikdar is currently an ICS computer science major and in the ICS Honors Program. In the fall, he will be pursuing his doctoral studies at UC San Diego in computer science. He was honored for the field of study in Comp/IS/Eng – Artificial Intelligence. Overall, Sikdar aims to develop cutting-edge AI tools and algorithms to advance scientific discovery.

Sikdar currently studies generative AI in the field of biology, specifically leveraging deep generative models for pathology and genomics research. His honors project focuses on synthesizing realistic tissue images to address the scarcity of high-quality image data — an issue driven by the high costs of equipment and expert annotation — thereby accelerating pathology research. His second project for the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program proposes a computational framework that treats cell repair as an optimization problem and aims to enable cost-effective in silico [research performed entirely on computers] exploration of potential cell repair strategies before lab validation.

Looking ahead, Sikdar intends to focus on AI for science. He wants to design resource-efficient architectures for domain-specific reasoning in large foundation models. He said, “The question is, algorithmically speaking, how can we build AI systems that are both more efficient and more capable of reasoning in specialized domains?”

Earning the NSF GRFP Fellowship has brought forth reflection for Sikdar. “I’m honored and humbled to receive such a prestigious recognition. Moreover, I recognize that I have a responsibility to pursue meaningful research in my Ph.D. This award is giving me freedom to build generalizable solutions to address multiple problems at once.”

Outside the classroom, Sikdar has demonstrated strong leadership as president of the Quantum Computing Club at UC Irvine. Under his leadership, the club has grown significantly and expanded opportunities for students to engage with quantum computing. He sees this experience as foundational for this future work, where leadership and collaboration will play a key role in driving impactful research.

Sikdar credits much of his growth to the mentorship and support he received at UC Irvine. He was mentored by Associate Professor Jing Zhang, whose guidance in computational biology and AI helped shape his research direction. He also thanks Professor Sandy Irani for her unwavering support and club mentorship as well as Professor Volodymyr Minin for his continued encouragement. “I’m truly grateful to the faculty and graduate mentors who have guided me throughout my undergraduate career,” he said. He also expressed appreciation for the broader UC Irvine community, including the Donald Bren School of ICS, the ICS Honors Program, and his peers, whose collaboration and support played a meaningful role in his journey.

Emily Tian was awarded the NSF GRFP in biostatistics. Tian is finishing her undergraduate degree in data science and statistics at UC Santa Barbara, and she will be joining ICS in the fall to pursue her Ph.D. in statistics.

Tian seeks to develop statistical methodology to help evaluate biomarkers in germ cell tumors, a rare type of pediatric cancer. In rare disease settings with limited patient data, efficient sampling designs are typically used. “I am extending efficient sampling designs to joint-longitudinal survival models,” said Tian, “so that we can assess the longitudinal patterns of germ cell tumor biomarker levels in relation to patients’ clinical diagnostics.”

This research will help studies overcome the challenge of recruiting large enough patient cohorts, which is especially needed in diseases where patients are rare and biomarker samples are costly or invasive to collect, explained Tian. “Studying these biomarkers will help us understand how to diagnose patients and develop therapeutics. Beyond germ cell tumor biomarkers, this methodology will be broadly applicable to all disease settings with limited data.”

Tian also attended ISI-BUDS and was mentored and will continue to be co-advised by Michelle Nuño, ICS alumna and current assistant professor at University of Southern California.

“I am very appreciative of everyone who has helped me along the way in this process. I am proud to be mentored by Dr. Michelle Nuño, who has gone above and beyond to help me with the NSF-GRFP application.”

“I feel extremely grateful for this fellowship,” said Tian. “Especially when research funding is so limited, the recognition from this award is very motivating, and I am excited to work in this research area during my PhD.”

– Tonya Becerra