E&PS Graduate Student Sarah Moran has been awarded a 2018 NASA Earth and Space Sciences Graduate Fellowship in Astrophysics for her proposal entitled “Determining the Role of Hazes in the Atmospheres of Temperate Planets in M-Dwarf Systems.” This is a highly competitive fellowship program and in 2018 only 8 of the 177 proposals submitted were selected for funding.

E&PS Graduate Student Bryné Hadnott has been awarded a 2018 NASA Earth and Space Sciences Graduate Fellowship in Planetary Sciences for her proposal entitled “Characterization of tholins in aqueous media: implications for detecting prebiotic molecules on Titan’s surface”. This is a highly competitive fellowship program and in 2018 only 24 of the 223 submitted were selected for funding.

E&PS Graduate Student Xinting Yu won the Dwornik Award for the Best Graduate Oral Presentation at the 2018 Lunar and Planetary Science Conference for her talk entitled “Where does Titan sand come from: Insight from Mechanical Properties of Titan Organic Analogs.”

The Dwornik Award was started in 1991 with a generous endowment by Dr. Stephen E. Dwornik, who wished to encourage students at U.S. schools to become involved with NASA and planetary science. The award consists of a plaque and a monetary award given for outstanding student presentations at the annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) hosted by the Lunar and Planetary Institute (LPI). The awards are managed and judged by the Planetary Geology Division of the Geological Society of America