Ethan Epperly selected for NSF GRFP!

by Natalia Diaz Amabilis, PR Assistant 

Congratulations to Ethan Epperly, a fourth year undergraduate  student at UCSB for being recently selected for the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP)! This program functions to help ensure the vitality of the human resource base of science and engineering in the United States and reinforces its diversity. The program recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in NSF-Supported science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines who are pursuing research-based master's and doctoral degrees at accredited United States institutions. 

Past fellows include numerous Nobel Prize winners, U.S. Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu, Google founder, Sergey Brin and Freakonomics co-author, Steven Levitt.

Although he is thankful to have received this high-ranking award, he is in the process of accepting a Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship (DOE CSGF) instead, which will provide him an additional year of support and will give him additional opportunities to network and collaborate with researchers at other universities and national labs. 

Epperly belongs to the College of Creative Studies and is double majoring in Computing and Math with an emphasis on scientific computation. He worked for five years at Sandia National Labs working with Dr. Ryan Sills, who is now a Professor at Rutgers, on computational modeling of structural materials, for which they produced two papers which have been accepted in Acta Materialia and the Journal of Mechanics and Physics of Solids.

He has recently been working with Professor Chandresakaran at UCSB on fast algorithms for structured systems of linear equations and machine learning. Epperly will continue to work on computational linear algebra next year as a PhD student in the Applied and Computational Mathematics program at Caltech.

We wish Ethan the best in his pursuit of higher education as we celebrate his excellence in academia.