Graduate student receives NASA FINESST award

Ishita Pal, our first interdisciplinary doctoral Earth and Energy Sciences program cohort student, has received a Future Investigators in NASA Earth and Space Science and Technology (FINESST) grant to fund her research studying the various nucleosynthesis processes that make heavy elements in stars. Pal was one of 32 graduate students out of 224 applicants in the Planetary Science division to receive this grant. The $148,498 grant has been awarded for a three-year period and covers her stipend, tuition, publication costs, and travel to national and international research conferences.

FINESST is a NASA grant program through which the NASA Science Mission Directorate (SMD) solicits proposals from accredited U.S. universities and other eligible organizations for graduate student-designed and performed research projects that contribute to SMD's science, technology, and exploration goals.

Earlier this year, Pal also won the Lunar and Planetary Institute's Career Development Award for outstanding first author abstract submission to the 53rd Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. In August, she received a NASA Planetary Sciences Division Travel Grant for presenting a talk at the 85th Annual Meeting of the Meteoritical Society in Glasgow, Scotland.