NSF names record number of graduate fellows, rebounding from 2025 dip

From ScienceMag:

The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) has chosen a record number of students this year to receive its prestigious graduate fellowship, rebounding from last year’s unusually small cohort. The size of this year’s class, announced today, together with a more traditional distribution across fields, could ease fears that NSF, under pressure from President Donald Trump’s administration, had decided to shrink and alter the nature of a program that has supported 50 future Nobel laureates since it began in 1952.

“My take is that the STEM community’s activism around last year’s cuts appears to have had significant positive impacts on this year’s class,” says Susan Brennan, a cognitive psychologist at Stony Brook University and former fellowship program officer.

The 2599 fellows in this year’s class surpass the previous record of 2554 in the 2023 cohort and is 42% larger than last year’s unusually small class of 1500. The 2025 class was announced in two stages, and the second cohort of 500 was dominated by artificial intelligence and quantum information science, top priorities for the White House.

This year’s class returns to a more familiar distribution, with engineering and biology once again leading the pack. But whereas in 2023 and ’24 those two disciplines each garnered about one-quarter of the awards, this year saw a shift toward engineering, with some 35% of the awards going to students in that area, followed by 19% in biology. At the same time, the life sciences was the discipline most represented among the honorable mentions, comprising 40% of the 1440 total. Among awardees, computing and information science saw a slight uptick, from 7% in 2023 and ’24 to 10%. And psychology took a hit, from 5% and 6% to 2% of the overall pie.

The NSF fellowship provides students with an annual stipend of $37,000 for 3 years and gives their institutions $16,000 annually to defray tuition and other educational costs. It’s also a portable scholarship, in contrast to the typical arrangement in which a graduate student’s support is tied to their institution, either from their adviser’s research grant or a graduate training program in a particular field. NSF says it received nearly 14,000 applications for this year’s class.

NSF has launched an initiative to identify high-tech companies willing to contribute to the support of future classes of graduate fellows. But an agency spokesperson says, “NSF plans to support [this year’s] fellows with available appropriated funds in [fiscal year] 2026.”

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