Record number of NSF GRFP awards in 2026, awarded to the usual suspects

Several outlets have run articles with the unexpected good news that the National Science Foundation is giving out more GRFP awards than ever, after a deep reduction in 2025.

Hooray! 

But those awards, and I have written about several times before, are highly concentrated in a small number of institutions.

MIT, with about 4.5 thousand undergrads gets 88 awards, versus the entire University of Texas system  of about 200K undergrads getting ~63 awards.

Harvard University, with about ~7k undergrads, gets 51 awards, versus the entire University of California system of about ~200K undergrads getting ~300 awards.

Again, the NSF does not disclose a lot of data about who applied to the awards, so it could be that Texas students aren’t submitting proposals at the same rate. But I recently ran across an analysis of who gets fellowships in by Dominque Baker, which points out that in the awards examined there, they cluster in people working at universities deemed “prestigious.” She wrote:

Longstanding methods of (fellowship) selection… tend to coincidentally find talent in the same places, year after year.

I suspect but can’t prove this describes the GRFP process. Oh, look, it’s just coincidence that a small number of east coast universities suck up most of the awards. Every. Year.

External links

NSF awards record number of coveted PhD fellowships in surprise move 

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

 Who gets Guggenheims?

The 2025 NSF GRFP awards, now with double the bias

Science magazine reports a new skew in the awarding of the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship Program (NSF GRFP) awards.

No awards in life sciences. Zip. Zero. Zilch.

I used to joke that there was no Nobel prize for biology. Now it seems there’s no GRFPs, either. The awards are heavily skewed toward computer science, particularly artificial intelligence. 

And let’s not forget that the number of awards was cut in half.

I strongly suspected that the awards were probably heavily skewed to fancy, well funded research universities and showed little love to the larger public university systems, which has been going on for as long as I know. But I had to poke the wound and look at the award data. Currently easy to download into an Excel file.

I  posted a super quick check on the numbers in a Bluesky thread.

Harvard University, with about 25,000 students total (many who would not be eligible) gets 25 GRFP awards.

Meanwhile, the entire University of Texas system, with about 250,000 students total (again, many not eligible) gets 30.

Embattled Columbia University, about 33,000 students total, gets 29 GRFP awards.

Arizona State University, with over 183,000 students total, gets 8 GRFP awards.

MIT, which is tiny, gets 82 GRFP awards. They always get a lot of awards, but the number of awards per student has jumped. Back in 2022, MIT had 83 awards, but keep in mind that because the number of awards were halved this year, the 82 award count this year is proportionately much heftier than the 83 awards in 2022.

The University of California system, which is gigantic, gets about 147 GRFP awards. (I say “about” because I just searched the Excel spreadsheet for “University of California,” and I know some universities in that system don’t follow that naming convention.) 

Yes, I could try to figure out student enrolment numbers better so they might more accurately reflect the population of students eligible for GRFP awards, but there is no way that the overall trend would budge.

I do not believe talent to so concentrated in such a small number of institutions. It’s a Matthew effect.

A recent article by Craig McClain is also worth pointing out here. McClain points out that the current academic training system makes it extraordinarily difficult to be a career scientist unless you have money to burn. The way they NSF GRFP program runs contributes to this problem.

References

McClain CR. 2025. Too poor to science: How wealth determines who succeeds in STEM. PLoS Biology 23(6): e3003243. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3003243 

Related posts

The NSF GRFP problem, 2022 edition  (Links to my older rants – er, posts – about this award contained within)

External links

Prestigious NSF graduate fellowship tilts toward AI and quantum 

“Equal contribution” statements don’t mean much: Nobel prize edition

This is not a post about the Nobel prizes. It is a post about authorship.

The Nobel Prize for chemistry was given two people for protein folding. I told students in my introductory biology classes for years that whoever could solve that problem should book a ticket to Stockholm, because it would get a Nobel, and I’m pleased to see I was right on that count.

On Bluesky, Michael Hoffman pointed out that the key paper about AlphaFold has an equal contribution statement:

(T)he AlphaFold paper has 19 authors who “contributed equally” but only two of them (Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper - ZF) get part of the Nobel Prize 🤔 

So why those two people out of all the 19 who made, allegedly, equal contributions? The paper has a “Contributions” statement:

J.J. and D.H. led the research.

I don’t think there has ever been a clearer demonstration that “equal contribution” statements don’t mean much of anything except to maybe the people involved. And their relatives.

Also worth noting that in the 19 equal contributions were, I believe, two women. (Guess based on given names, which is not ideal, I know. Still.)

More generally, authorship is a terrible way of assigning credit. I have, and will continue to, argue that the CRediT system of identifying specific contributions should be adopted just across the board.

References

Jumper J, Evans R, Pritzel A, Green T, Figurnov M, Ronneberger O, Tunyasuvunakool K, Bates R, Žídek A, Potapenko A, Bridgland A, Meyer C, Kohl SAA, Ballard AJ, Cowie A, Romera-Paredes B, Nikolov S, Jain R, Adler J, Back T, Petersen S, Reiman D, Clancy E, Zielinski M, Steinegger M, Pacholska M, Berghammer T, Bodenstein S, Silver D, Vinyals O, Senior AW, Kavukcuoglu K, Kohli P,  Hassabis D. 2021. Highly accurate protein structure prediction with AlphaFold. Nature 596: 583–589. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03819-2

Publication Star

I have been blogging about conference posters for fourteen years. Many people have told me that my blog helped them win a poster award.

Today, I finally shared a poster award!

This certificate is for an encore presentation of our poster, “Are conference presentations accessible? Insights from an online survey to improve equity.” This is a project I was invited to work on last year. It’s been shown at a couple of meetings of the International Society of Medical Publication Professionals.

The “Publication Star” award is for the poster that the judges most want to see written up in  a manuscript and published in a journal. That award category is the most academic thing ever. “You win an award! Your prize is... to get back to writing, you layabout!” 😶

You can read the poster at the conference website. This version has a seven and a half minute video by lead author Emily Messina explaining the works.

The poster is also part of our FigShare collection of material related to this project. You can compare and contrast versions 1 and 2 of the poster, presented at European meeting in January and the American meeting this month.

External links

International Society of Medical Publication Professionals

Poster awards for 19th ISMPP meeting

The NSF GRFP problem, 2020 edition

The National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program (NSF GRFP) awards were announced today. And the familiar “Matthew Effect” pattern continues.

• The entire University of Texas system, with 167,028 undergraduate students, gets 55 awards (0.03% awards / student).
• The entire California State University system, with around 484,300 undergraduate students, gets 39 awards (0.008% awards / student).
• Harvard University, with 6,788 undergraduate students, gets 22 awards (0.3% awards / student).
• Yale University, with 5,964 undergrad students, also gets 22 awards (0.3% awards / student).
• MIT, with 4,530 undergraduates, got 68 awards (1.5% awards / student).

The success rate of Harvard and Yale is about ten times higher than the Texas system and about 45 times higher than the California State University system.

If you want a GRFP, go to an Ivy League university. Or some other well-resourced east coast university.

You can download the NSF GRFP data here. Scroll down and search for “Export options” to get an Excel spreadsheet.

It has been five years since Terry McGlynn did the important job of first pointing out how slanted the playing field is. It’s been four years since NSF announced changes to their rules to try to create more diversity. But the same pattern keeps happening.

Is this NSF’s fault? Not necessarily. The NSF doesn’t release data on how many applications come in from each institution (as far as I know), and that is almost certainly extremely uneven. The missions of something like the California State University system is very different from that of an Ivy League institution.

I still think we need to call the NSF on this every single year. Something like an NSF GRFP is the sort of thing that can make a career happen. An award from a national funding agency creates so many opportunities that it’s not clear that the goals of the NSF are best served by those award going to students from extremely well-resourced institutions,

They’re two years old now, but if this question interests you, please do see these two amazing posts by Natalie Telis.

• The price of a GRFP, part 1
• The price of a GRFP, part 2

This concentration of GRFP awards is puzzling given that for regular awards, NSF does think about its overall portfolio of awards and is aware of the problems with concentrating many awards in a few institutions. It considers factors like whether a grant is coming from an EPSCOR state, which is essentially a measure of how successful a state has been at getting NSF funding.

Related posts

Fewer shots, more diversity?
The NSF GRFP problem continues

Stop pussyfooting around the problem of biases in awards

At the Sociobiology blog, Joan Strassman tackles inequality in scientific awards. This topic has been making the round lately because of the National Science Foundation’s Waterman award, which this year went to two men. Again. It looks like the last time the award went to a woman was in 2004, to Kristi Anseth. Weirdly, it looks like the Waterman did a pretty good job of splitting between men and women in the first few years, and then it’s been all men since 2005.

Partially in response to community input, the NSF changed the eligibility criteria for the award. It is basically extending the time frame for eligibility since a person received their Ph.D. (And I will pause to take note that you are still considered a “young” scientist in your late 30s.)

I’m betting you right now that’s not going to fix the problem. And I doubt the measures Strassman suggests, like “Let’s be active in nominating women!” will do it, either. But here’s what will fix the problem. Guaranteed.

You get the award organizers to say, in public, “We’re going to give half these awards to women. Agender individuals are eligible for either.”

And that’s it. Dust off your hands. You’re done.

The NSF gave two awards this year and in 2012. Give two awards every year, one to a man and one to a woman. Or alternate years. It doesn’t matter.

Yes, I know people will jump in and say, “But merit...”,  but I don’t care. This is not a job. Nobody’s livelihood is harmed because they did not receive an award. The question is, “Are you serious about fixing inequality or not? If you are, this fixes it immediately. Everything else just allows the problem to linger.”

I’ve had discussions with people about why the Oscars split their acting into two categories, one for men, one for women. But one good thing about it is that every year, women win awards.

External links

Can we fix inequity in awards for women scientists?
When a series of entirely reasonable decisions leads to biased outcomes: thoughts on the Waterman Award
Let’s nominate folks for NSF’s Waterman award, including womenNSF’s Water Man awardNational Science Foundation modifies Alan T. Waterman Award eligibility criteria

And the cycle repeats

Today is the last day of class for the Spring semester, which kind of means it’s the end of the first regular academic year at UTRGV. Okay, sure, there is summer session, but really, most of us faculty have a nine month salary, so our pay stubs say this is the end.

Where are we with UTRGV? Ugh. It’s still in beta testing. There are still many weird, unsettled (and unsettling) things going down for my liking. There’s an obsession with instant growth, and a lot of parachute candidates for administrative positions. Could it have been better? Sure. I suppose it could have been worse, though.

Meanwhile, speaking of education, Texas is set to review its science standards again. Slate has the story. Notably, author Zack Kopplin writes:

Via public records request, Slate obtained the full list of 545 applicants. Many seem up for the task, including the employees of the Perot Museum of Nature and Science in Dallas, scientists from Houston’s energy industry, the president of the Micropaleontology Press, science-assessment specialists from the textbook publisher Pearson, and hundreds of K-12 science teachers or college professors.

I was one of those hundreds of educators who applied, by the way. I’ll let you know if I get picked, but I think the odds are long. As the article says:

Members of the Texas State Board have full discretion over whom they want to appoint to the review panels—and history shows they often pick creationists.

In other words, here we go again. At least because this is happening in summer, I should have time to blog about it.

And it’s also Star Wars day! I won this glass at the pub last night during trivia.Thanks, Grain to Glass! They made both Light Side and Dark side glasses. Only Dark Side glasses were left, but I would have picked that one anyway. I’m definitely a Sith.

I won it knowing what “AT-AT” stands for. (Gloss for the non-Star Wars fans: The AT-ATs were these things, introduced so memorably in The Empire Strikes Back.)

“AT-AT” stands for “All Terrain Armored Transport.”

External links

Scientist vs. Creationist: Who will get to update Texas’ science standards?

Fewer shots, more diversity?

The National Science Foundation just announced changes to its Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) that limits the number of applications for grad students to one. The NSF lists several reasons for this:

1) result in a higher success rate for GRFP applicants

You know how else you could increase success rate? Give more awards. But the political reality is that the NSF budget is stagnant, so the best they can do is increase in success rate at the cost of limiting chances to apply.

2) increase the diversity of the total pool of individuals and of institutions from which applications may come through an increase in the number of individuals applying before they are admitted into graduate programs,

You know what else could increase the diversity of applicants? Instead of changing the applicants, change the reviewers. Change the criterion those new reviewers are judging the awards by. Let’s not forget that in the past, GRFPs have been criticized for giving awards to doctoral students in a limited number of institutions. If the review process is biased, tweaks to the applicant pool won’t create more diversity, because they’ll be going through the same filter.

And just because I run a master’s program, let me call out that in the past, only 3.5% of awards went to students in master’s programs (page 3, footnote 3 in this report). Why do you hate master’s students, NSF?!

Terry McGlynn notes, however:

Shifting the emphasis of @NSF GRFPs to undergrads will increase representation because it will recruit people. If you give a GRFP to someone already in grad school, odds are they would be successful anyway. GRFPs can get undergrads into good labs.

This is a good point, but if undergraduates are still competing against graduates, and there’s still a bias towards the advanced doctoral students as the “safer bet,” the change in the applicant pool might not achieve the desired result in diversity. This might be an argument for splitting the program: one for undergraduates transitioning to graduate programs, one for graduate students in programs.

Finally, NSF’s last reason for the change.

3) ease the workload burden for applicants, reference writers, and reviewers.

I am glad to see this listed as a reason, because it is honest. It’s a lot of hard work to review applications, and you have to keep it to a reasonable level. I think it might be even more honest if it was listed as reason #1 instead of reason #3.

External links

NSF Graduate Fellowships are a part of the problem
How the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship is slowly turning into a dissertation grant
Evaluation of the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship Program final report
NSF makes its graduate fellowships more accessible

Picture from here.

“Hey, did anyone win a Nobel?”

Earlier this week, I got one of those emails that had been forwarded through the administrative chain (Provost’s office to dean to associate dean to department chair to faculty).

“Our Strategic Analysis office need to know what awards our faculty have won!”

I keep wondering why individual faculty are being asked to for this information through email when our institution subscribes to a service called Digital Measures that tracks this stuff. Faculty enter their achievements in the system, and people can pull reports from it at any time. I also wonder why this information can’t be pulled from the annual reports faculty have to submit every year.

Although I hadn’t won any awards, I opened up the spreadsheet to see what they were looking for. First line of the spreadsheet:

Nobel prize.

Eyebrow raise.

I keep looking down the list. Pulitzer prize. McArthur award. Awards that get international coverage.

If a faculty member won a Nobel prize, most universities would have press releases sent to every major news outlet and announcements up on their website out before the first morning coffee break.

The thought that adminstration has to ask, “By the way, did anyone on our campus win a Nobel while we weren’t looking?” makes adminstrators look like they’re isolated in some alternate universe bubble that only rarely connects to our own, and they occasionally manage to break through for a brief peek at what’s happening in the reality of faculty, staff, students, and major media outlets.

Top ten for three months running!

Just realized that the recent crustacean nociception paper I co-authored is in the top ten most read articles for the third month running in Biology Open! It was #2 for April, #6 for May, and #6 again for June.

Thank you to all who have taken an interest and read this!

What does an institution brag about?

There are times it feels like my university is focusing on all the wrong things.

I may be a grumpy prof, but I’m still a prof. I wondered if it was just my confirmation bias. Is there more coverage of stuff that annoys me, or do I just remember the stuff that annoys me?

I decided to do a little survey. I went to my university’s news site. It had the last four months of press releases up. I went though each one, and categorized the press releases into a few categories. (Click to enlarge.)

It’s understandable that the most common press release was to promote upcoming events. Plays, exhibitions, public lectures, and the like.

I was pleasantly surprised to see student success coming up in second place. Showcasing our students is one of the most important things an institution should do. The plugging and cheering for the other members of the university community – faculty, staff, administration, alumni – was surprisingly even in representation.

Some of the things that I thought was getting more attention than they deserved (those who know me can probably guess) weren’t anywhere near as high on the list as I expected them to be. I probably was indulging in a little confirmation bias, but I’d almost like to do a breakdown of other venues, like tweets and media coverage, before I completely chalk my annoyance at news coverage up to my grumpiness.

This time frame (February to June) included the end of the school year, a time when there are lots of “end of the year” awards. I wonder if the distribution of news would be different in the fall semester.

Top ten again for crayfish nociception!

Just a brief moment of celebration as I point out that our latest paper on crayfish nociception is in the top ten most read Biology Open articles for a second straight month!

I’m very pleased.

“You don’t have to be clever to make a discovery”

I think the Nobel Prizes may do more harm to science than good. Over on Quora, I’ve seen more than a couple of questions asking about the IQ of Nobel prize winners, often mentioned as though winning a Nobel was some sort of objective yardstick for intelligence.

With the awards only a few weeks away, I was pleased to hear this refreshing, level headed take on the prizes from a winner of the award, Tim Hunt:

Robyn Williams: (T)he other startling thing you said is that you are not clever personally, and I find that amazing. How can you win a Nobel Prize if you’re not clever?

Tim Hunt: Because winning a Nobel Prize isn’t about being clever at all, it's about making… at least in physiology or medicine it’s about making discoveries, and you don’t have to be clever to make a discovery I don’t think, it just comes up and punches you on the nose. Sort of one moment you didn’t know that and the next moment, coo-er! Gosh! So that’s how it works.

Related posts

Will you still love me if I don’t win the Nobel prize?
Are prizes good for science?

External links

Nobel Prize for discoveries, not cleverness says laureate Tim Hunt

Alternative metrics, but mainstream happiness

Because I am starved for attention, I have been obsessively watching the altmetric score for my article on post publication peer review in Neuron last week. It’s performed well from day one. But I’m screen grabbing this today:

“Other articles of a similar age in Neuron: Ranks 1st.”

Thanks to all who read the piece, tweeted, and shared it. I am grateful for your attention.

The sixth fan: missed it by that much

In the past few weeks on my other social media sites, I’ve been asking for help in getting UTPA into the finals of the Sixth Fan competition. Up for grabs was $100,000 in scholarship money. Given that we serve one of the poorest areas in the country, I reckoned we could put that scholarship money to better use than most universities.

We made it past the first round, then the elite eight, and into the final four. We started the final four with only 10% of the vote, but we managed to reduce the spread to only a few percentage points by yesterday.

I voted a lot, but it was not enough. We are not in the finals. Alas. But we came close. And given than we were against a university with much more “name” recognition (Brighman Young University), we were competitive.

As Maxwell Smart said...

Asking about awards

Just got an email from our administration. They are asking faculty to list awards they’ve won. Awards like being names a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigators, MacArthur Foundation Fellows (the so-called “genius award”), being elected to the National Academy of Sciences, getting a National Medal of Science, a Pulitzer prize, or a Nobel prize.

Because, apparently, our university wouldn’t know if a faculty member won a Pulitzer or Nobel unless they specifically asked. “What was the trip to Stockholm in your travel request for, anyway?”

I find it a touch offensive. But I was told I’m being thin-skinned about it.

Geek love

Squee!

This blog is featured at Girls are Geeks today!

They say lots of nice things about this blog. I’m blushing. Thank you, Girls!

Before I hit the road

I’ll be in Baton Rouge this coming week, where I am attending a teaching workshop. My students better not be doing this unless they are willing to take video of it.

My current master’s student will not be my master’s student for much longer, as she successfully defended her thesis last week. Hooray!

My most recent paper on whether Japan could be a haven for Marmorkrebs has achieved a“Heavily accessed” button. So keep reading!

Faces of Biology photo contest

The American Institute of Biological Sciences is running a photo contest called Faces of Biology.

They want to showcase the diversity of biological research and biologists. The deadline is 30 September 2011, and the winning photo will be used as a cover to BioScience magazine!

Get out your cameras and search through your archives! Enter the competition here!

Vote in the Labby Awards!

The Scientist is sponsoring a contest for online science resources called the Labby Awards. They have an award for video, and an award for science website.

It’s a tough choice. There are several good sites in the running. As a neuro guy, I know The Brain Observatory does good work.

I want to ask you to vote for my blogging buddy, Carin Bondar. Carin and I have blogged together, and she’s shown up in some blog posts. And I am so pleased that she just joined me on the Craywatch citizen science project.

You should go here and vote for Carin right now!

And take a second to check out the finalists for the best science videos!