Mills: NDSEG Fellowship

Excerpt from The UCSB Current article "Aspiring Engineers Receive National Research Fellowships, With Significant Funding"

Engineering graduate students Wesley Mills (electrical and computer engineering), Griffin Tong (materials), Joshua Baston (materials), and Max Emerick (mechanical engineering) have won a significant national award to pursue their respective doctoral research projects.

The four are among 162 total awardees of the 2024 NDSEG Fellowship, which covers tuition, a $43,200 annual stipend, health insurance and travel funds.

“This is a very competitive award, so we are proud of these students, who represent different departments in our highly regarded College of Engineering,” said Leila J. Rupp, Interim Anne and Michael Towbes Graduate Dean. “We also applaud their faculty advisors, who do the important work of mentoring them as researchers who will go on to make original contributions in academia or industry. As the comments of awardees make clear, receiving such a prestigious fellowship has benefits beyond the financial support, as important as that is.” 

Mills is interested in integrating metasurfaces with traditional vertical cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) to push beyond the current device limitations. “One of my goals at UCSB is to remain in awe of my research,” he said. “I think it’s easy — amidst the constant pressure to publish meaningful results in top-tier journals — to forget the beauty of science. I find my work, at the intersection of optics, material science and electrical engineering, to be endlessly fascinating, and I try never to lose sight of that.”

The fellowship, Mills said, also helps him overcome an internal obstacle. “Receiving this award also helped me overcome the imposter syndrome I feel, which is another thing I'm fairly certain most of us struggle with,” he said. “This award will help me advance my research by freeing up time, which would otherwise be used for TAing to ensure I have a paycheck. Also, receiving the NDSEG is a line I can write on my CV which will stand out to future potential employers post-graduate school.”

Over 4,400 NDSEG fellowships have been awarded since 1989.

The UCSB Current "Aspiring Engineers Receive National Research Fellowships, With Significant Funding" (full article)