EE Students Receive 2022 NSF Graduate Research Fellowship

May 23, 2022

Kaylo Littlejohn

Alumnus Kaylo Littlejohn ’20 received a 2022 National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship. The fellowship was awarded by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (NSF GRFP), the oldest graduate fellowship of its kind.

Kaylo Littlejohn received his BS in electrical engineering from Columbia in 2020. While at Columbia, he worked under the direction of Dr. Paul Sajda, where he created virtual reality 3D environments and image processing software for non-invasive brain machine interface experiments. He is currently a PhD student in the electrical engineering and computer sciences at University of California–Berkeley.

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.

Fellows are awarded a three-year annual stipend of $34,000 and a $12,000 education allowance paid to their chosen institution. Past fellows include many Nobel Prize winners, Google founder Sergey Brin, and Freakonomics co-author, Steven Levitt.

Peter Ballentine

Incoming EE MS/PhD candidate Peter Ballentine has received an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, which supports full-time research-based graduate students in STEM fields who have demonstrated potential for significant research advancements.

He received this fellowship for his undergraduate research utilizing aerosol jet printing to fabricate direct-write and template-free three-dimensional graphene structures. This process and the resulting structures have great potential for electrochemical applications such as sensors, providing a simple method to increase surface area of an electrode without increasing its horizontal footprint.

This fall, Ballentine will join the Columbia Lab for Unconventional Electronics under the guidance of Prof. John Kymissis. Previous, he received dual degrees in Materials Science and Chemistry from Duke University in the United States and Duke Kunshan University in China, splitting his time between the two campuses. During this time, he worked extensively in the Franklin Lab at Duke University, headed by Dr. Aaron Franklin. The work he has done in the Franklin Lab has been published in ACS Nano and IEEE Sensors.

“I am elated to receive this award and am deeply grateful for the guidance Prof. Aaron Franklin provided over my undergraduate degree. His mentorship was essential to my growth as a researcher, and I am immensely excited to start this new chapter of my life working towards a PhD at Columbia with Prof. Kymissis as a NSF Graduate Research Fellow,” Ballentine said.