Pryce Millikin awarded Honorable Mention by NSF’s Graduate Research Fellowship program

Yoder Lab Master’s student Pryce Millikin has been awarded an Honorable Mention from the National Science Foundation’s prestigious Graduate Research Fellowship Program.

The GRFP provides three years of stipend support and research funding to master’s and doctoral students in all fields of science across the United States — this year only 1,000 applicants received GRF awards, and 3,018 were granted Honorable Mention. That represents a dramatic decrease in the GRF since 2024, when more than 2,000 applicants were offered awards.

Pryce is the only student at CSUN to receive recognition from the GRFP this year, and one of nine students across the entire California State University system to earn GRF Honorable Mentions. (No GRF awards have been offered to students currently enrolled at a CSU campus.) He is planning to defend his master’s thesis project, using machine learning methods and crowdsourced data to understand how weather affects Joshua trees’ specialized pollinators, this summer, before continuing on to doctoral research at Auburn University.