Recent grad Eason Wang wins highly prestigious fellowship from NSF
As NSF continues to cut funding, the news of this "life changing" fellowship is a rare win for the young researcher, and a path toward a bright career
Eason Wang has been awarded an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and will start his next science chapter in Pittsburgh this fall
U of A undergraduate student Eason Wang has been awarded a highly prestigious Graduate Research Fellowship (GRF) from the National Science Foundation in the field of “Astronomy and Physics - Computationally Intensive Research” to continue his science career over the coming 5 years. Eason graduated from the University of Arizona with majors in Astronomy and Physics (with Honors) and minors in Mathematics and Japanese.
Read about Eason's experience at U of A in his own words, here.
The good news for Eason comes at a time where the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program has made significantly fewer awards given the reduction in funding that was requested by the federal government. The “life changing” NSF fellowship is one of the fundamental pillars that allows the most promising young researchers in the US to pursue their career and grow into the science leaders of tomorrow.
Eason has been working within the Arizona Cosmology Lab as an undergraduate researcher (advisor: Tim Eifler) since 2023 on developing a machine learning based inference method to measure Kinematic Lensing (KL) using data from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI). Lensing is one of the core cosmological probes of ongoing and future surveys such as the Roman Space Telescope and the Rubin Observatory, which just saw first light. Eason’s research is centered around training convolutional neural networks to directly infer the lensing measurement from galaxy images and spectra. “His work has the potential to become a centerpiece of the Kinematic Lensing analysis pipeline in the future,” Eifler said.
Eason received the 2025 Astronomy “Excellence in Undergraduate Research Award” for his work and had originally planned to continue working in the Arizona Cosmology Lab as a Research Data Specialist during a gap year between graduation and grad school. Read his interview here! He has now been accepted into the CMU’s Astronomy and Physics graduate program and will start his next science chapter in Pittsburgh this fall. “I do feel very blessed for this opportunity. It's hard to have to leave all my friends here so suddenly, but the opportunity is fantastic and I'll make best use of it,” Eason said.