Elon senior and alumni awarded National Science Foundation fellowships

Alana Evora ’23 and Chris D’Inzeo ’24 have been selected for the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship Program. Aubrey Spicola ’25 has been named an honorable mention.

Established in 1951, the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program is the nation’s oldest continuous investment in the U.S. STEM workforce. The program provides financial support and professional development to outstanding students in NSF-supported STEM disciplines who are pursuing research-based master’s and doctoral degrees at accredited U.S. institutions.

This year, the NSF GRFP received over 13,000 applications for 2,000 advertised awards. However, due to funding cuts, only 1,000 promising researchers were named recipients and over 3,000 were named honorable mentions—a marked shift from previous years when far more recipients were named than honorable mentions. Honorable mentions might still have the chance to be named recipients should more funding become available, and this story will be updated should any changes occur.

To learn more about the NSF GRFP and other nationally competitive awards like it, students and alumni should visit the National and International Fellowships Office’s website to schedule an appointment.

Chris D’Inzeo ’24

Chris D’Inzeo graduated from Elon in 2024 with a degree in chemistry. At Elon, D’Inzeo primarily worked with Vickie Moore, associate professor of chemistry, on a three-year project focused on evolving cell line models of chemoresistant cancers and understanding the roles of nucleic acid structures in the progression of chemotherapy resistance. Off campus, he was an Amgen Scholar at Duke University, where he worked in Amanda Hargrove’s lab on two different projects generally aimed at developing RNA as a target for therapeutic small molecules, and a student researcher at UNC Chapel Hill with Jeff Aubé and Ahlam Armaly on a project focused on the synthesis of a marine natural product with antimicrobial activity.

D’Inzeo was also a Periclean Scholar, a member of the marching band (drumline), and the co-founder of STEM Saturday, a STEM outreach program for Alamance-Burlington high schoolers.

D’Inzeo began his career with the National Cancer Institute after he received the highly competitive NIH Undergraduate Scholarship in his senior year, which provided a pathway for employment with the National Institutes of Health. He’s currently working with Jay Schneekloth with the NCI on projects aimed at developing bifunctional RNA targeting molecules as novel therapeutics. This will no doubt prepare him for his greatest academic challenge yet: a doctorate in chemistry at Princeton University.

D’Inzeo’s Elon mentors include Vickie Moore, Ahlam Armaly, Tony Rizzuo and Dan Wright.

Alana Evora ’23

Alana Evora graduated from Elon in 2023 with degrees in biology and computer science. An Honors Fellow, Evora won the Lumen Prize in 2021 to support her research project, “Simulating Vibrational Soundscapes to Investigate the Effect of Vibrational Road Noise on Animals.” Under the mentorship of Elon professor Jen Hamel, as well as in collaboration with Rex Cocroft (University of Missouri) and Shyam Madhusudhana (Curtin University), Evora created an open-source software tool called VibePy for studying vibrational communication, which is now freely available for download and shared in an open-access publication in the journal “Entomologica Experimentalis et Applicata.” In addition to her impressive undergraduate research, Evora is proud of her work as a Writing Center consultant, and as one of the chartering members of Elon’s first Asian interest sorority, Kappa Phi Lambda, Inc.

Since graduating, Evora has been working as a research technician at Duke University in the lab of Arnaldo Carreira-Rosario, where they use fruit flies to study how the brain becomes active for the first time during development, and how this early neural activity influences behavior. She is excited to stay at Duke in the fall to join the Neurobiology Graduate Training Program in the School of Medicine, studying developmental and systems neurobiology.

Her Elon mentors include Jen Hamel, Elizabeth von Briesen and Brant Touchette.

Aubrey Spicola ’25

Aubrey Spicola is a graduating senior with a major in astrophysics and a minor in mathematics. As an Honors Fellow, Spicola has been working with Tony Crider to develop a multiplayer mixed-reality planetarium intended to supplement introductory course materials in college astronomy with 3D visuals. She was also selected for a competitive NSF REU at Cornell University in 2024 where she worked with data from a recent release by the MeerKAT Telescope as part of the Thousand-Pulsar-Array program and focused on analyzing radio observations to study the timing properties of pulsars, and how these objects can be used to probe the interstellar medium.

In addition to her impressive research, Spicola is a senior residential assistant, an astronomy teaching assistant, and a tutor in the Koenigsberger Learning Center. She is particularly proud of her work as a planetarium specialist for nearly three years with the Schiele Museum of Natural History, where she wrote and created several seasonal shows, and helped lead an expedition for museum guests to Texas to view the solar eclipse in April 2024.

Spicola is eager to attend the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill this fall to earn her doctorate in physics. She will be attending as a Royster Fellow, UNC’s premier doctoral fellowship, which will provide her the opportunity to explore different research labs as she begins her graduate studies.

Her Elon mentors include Tony Crider, Kyle Altmann, Chris Richardson, Emily Evans and Martin Kamela.