The fellowship recognizes outstanding graduate students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Ten current students and recent alums of the University of Maryland’s Department of Mathematics received prestigious 2026 National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowships, which recognize outstanding graduate students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

This year’s awardees are:

• Anirud Aggarwal (B.S. ’25, computer science; B.S. ’25, mathematics)
• Yash Anand (B.S. ’25, physics; B.S. ’25, mathematics), Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Hannah Cairo, Ph.D. student in mathematics
• Owen Deen, Ph.D. student in applied mathematics and statistics, and scientific computation
• Darsh Gandhi, Ph.D. student in applied mathematics and statistics, and scientific computation
• Erin Hopper, computer science and mathematics double-degree student
• Jeremy Kuznetsov (B.S. ’25, mathematics), senior aerospace engineering major, Princeton University
• Gary Peng, computer science and mathematics double-degree student
• Rishi Pradeep (B.S. ’25, computer science and mathematics)
• Yujing Tang, Ph.D. student in mathematics

The NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program helps ensure the quality, vitality and strength of the United States' scientific and engineering workforce. The five-year fellowships provide three years of financial support, including an annual stipend of $37,000.

Since 1952, NSF has funded over 70,000 Graduate Research Fellowships out of more than 500,000 applicants. More than 40 Fellows have gone on to become Nobel laureates, and more than 450 have become members of the National Academy of Sciences.

Sujay Konda, Ishan Raghavendra and Daniel Yuan each ranked in the top 200 out of more than 4,300 competitors in one of the most prestigious mathematics contests for undergraduates in North America.

Every winter, thousands of college students across the United States and Canada sit down for six hours to take the 12-question Putnam Competition exam, widely considered one of the most difficult undergraduate math contests in the world. 

Most people who tackle the test walk away with a score of zero. Getting even a single point is considered an accomplishment.

But in December 2025, three University of Maryland students—computer science majors Sujay Konda and Ishan Raghavendra and mathematics major Daniel Yuan—represented UMD as a team and individually finished in the top 200 out of over 4,300 Putnam competitors.

Overall, UMD placed 14th among 487 participating institutions—marking the ninth consecutive year that the university has finished in the top 20 nationally. Although not part of UMD’s official team, computer science major Hanson Bai and mathematics majors Boheng Shao and Kelin Zhu were each recognized among the top 500 as well.

For Doron Levy, chair of UMD’s Department of Mathematics, this year’s results mean something beyond just a ranking.

“Schools like MIT, Princeton and Stanford recruit math majors specifically for their Putnam teams,” Levy said. “This is an amazing achievement, in particular given that there are very few public universities with comparable ranking. Our continued success says a lot about the quality of our students and the support they receive here.”

First-timers at the top

What makes this year’s results particularly striking is that two of the students who represented UMD in the competition had never tackled the Putnam before. Unlike Yuan, a returning contestant with previous Putnam success, Konda and Raghavendra were first-time competitors. Yet both freshmen finished among the top scorers in the country. 

Raghavendra, who plans to add a mathematics major, arrived at UMD already well-versed in competition math after years of proof-based contests, including high school-level American Mathematics Competitions, American Invitational Mathematics Examinations and HMMT tournaments. For him, Putnam was less a leap into the unknown than a continuation of something he already loved.

“I heard about the contest in high school and decided to participate because I love proof-based math,” Raghavendra said. “I credit most of my preparation to my previous math competition background, but Putnam was still a very different experience.”

With a background rooted more in competitive programming, Konda heard about the competition through friends and decided to give it a shot. He went in curious, worked through old Putnam exams to prepare and came out with something he had not quite expected—a new way of seeing problems.

“Coming from a mostly computer science background, I think taking the Putnam helped expand the different perspectives and ways to approach problems from a different field,” he said. “It was interesting to see the different types of solutions that exist in math, stuff you don’t see in computer science.” 

The formula for success

Students like Konda and Raghavendra are exactly the kind of contestants Roohollah Ebrahimian, a principal lecturer in UMD’s Department of Mathematics and the university’s Putnam coordinator, wants to reach. Ebrahimian, who has coached UMD’s Putnam team for more than a decade, noted that UMD’s nine-year winning streak was no accident.

“The formula for our success really comes down to two things,” he said. “Recruitment of our best students and extensive preparation.”

Ebrahimian maintains a running list of close to 100 students—drawn partly from top finishers at a high school math competition he runs for students in D.C. and Maryland (Yuan and Zhu both participated). Ebrahimian personally reaches out to each student at the start of every fall semester.

“UMD’s one-credit, 90-minute Putnam Express course has also helped prepare decades of students for the contests,” noted Ebrahimian, who teaches the class and established its accompanying guide. “The class predates my own time here and ensured many high scorers.”

Ebrahimian also found less conventional ways to stay connected to students, such as offering office hours in UMD’s dining halls to chat informally with students directly over a meal.

A few years ago, he also launched a YouTube channel to reach UMD math majors and prospective students and support their academic aspirations. Within weeks, students were finding his channel and emailing him about his math videos, and what began as an outreach experiment grew into something more. Ebrahimian began uploading videos specifically about Putnam and how to tackle math competition exams. The videos work through multiple failed attempts before landing on an answer, with him narrating what went wrong at each turn and explaining the “behind-the-scenes” reality of competitive test-taking.

“I wanted to be a resource for anyone trying to understand not just what the solutions to competition problems were but also how to arrive at them,” Ebrahimian said. “There are many resources that give you problems along with solutions, but not many that actually walk you through the process.”

Thanks to his efforts both online and in real life, UMD’s reputation for mathematical rigor and success in competitions has spread widely. In fall 2025, students from other institutions—including local community colleges in Maryland—began sitting in on Ebrahimian’s Putnam Express classes, hoping to find a formula for success.

“They’ve seen our success and have seen how Maryland has been consistently doing well,” Ebrahimian said. “Students want to be a part of that and learn.”

What’s next

Encouraged by their results this year, Konda and Raghavendra look forward to the next Putnam competition in December. Both freshmen are eager to test themselves against the nation’s best undergrad mathematicians again. And they hope others join them—the more, the merrier.

“Putnam’s for anyone passionate about math,” Raghavendra said. “There’s nothing to lose because even just getting a non-zero score is a big deal, and you can always try again the next year.”

“Considering how much fun I had preparing for Putnam and the different problem-solving skills I’ve developed from it, I think I’ll probably continue to participate for the rest of the time I’m here at UMD,” Konda added. “I just hope that more students will get involved in one way or another.”

This is the highest honor bestowed on a graduating senior each academic year, based on academic distinction, exemplary character and service to the campus or broader community. 

Two undergraduates in the University of Maryland's Department of Mathematics were named finalists for 2026 University Medalist, the highest honor bestowed on a graduating senior each academic year, based on academic distinction, exemplary character and service to the campus or broader community. 

Anirud Aggarwal

Anirud Aggarwal’s undergraduate research accomplishments read like a standout doctoral student’s: In Rio de Janeiro this year, the dual-degree scholar in computer science and mathematics presented a paper on artificial intelligence (AI) image generation at the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR). Next month he will present a paper on scaling vision systems at the IEEE/Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition—a study that earned him a Computing Research Association’s Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award honorable mention.

But it was during Aggarwal’s semester abroad at Kyoto University in Japan when his passions bloomed. By establishing a philosophy and ethics reading group that discussed Japanese and English texts, he developed a space for cross-cultural expression. He called Kyoto and UMD places “where curiosity sparks discovery, kindling the next generation of researchers.”

More recently, Aggarwal joined a San Francisco-based startup as their founding research engineer to advance computer vision and generative AI. His research impact has also rippled through his community; through his work with Computer Engineers of the Next Generation, he developed curricula and taught computer science to thousands of students and trained numerous instructors. 

Aggarwal “represents the very best of what the University of Maryland strives to cultivate in its students: exceptional intellectual ability, meaningful contributions to research, and a deep commitment to service and mentorship,” said Associate Professor of Computer Science Abhinav Shrivastava.

Nishkal Hundia 

Nishkal Hundia arrived at UMD from India as an international student struggling to find his place. He’s graduating as one who helped classmates find theirs, believing that “hard work is not rewarded equally when access is unequal,” said the double-major in computer science and mathematics.

In his freshman year Hundia co-founded UMD’s AI/ML Club, recruiting students without experience so they could find mentors, opportunities and a sense of belonging. He grew it to more than 800 members, many of whom partnered with startup companies or used the experience to land jobs.

A teaching assistant for discrete mathematics, Hundia has helped his peers not just academically but also financially. In 2024 he launched a “hackathon” awareness initiative and secured more than $5,000 in travel funding for UMD students who otherwise could not afford to compete.

Hundia’s paper on modern AI models was presented last year at an ICLR workshop in Singapore. Also last year he presented a paper on deep learning and historical storm data at the International Conference on Structural Safety and Reliability. The recipient of a $45,000 Open Philanthropy grant to study AI reasoning, Hundia also earned both the Andrew Reisse Endowed Memorial Scholarship and John D. Gannon Scholarship from the Department of Computer Science.

“Nishkal is extremely bright and has personally shattered my expectations of what undergraduate students are capable of and how quickly they can become strong researchers,” said Assistant Professor of Computer Science Sarah Wiegreffe.

Hundia this fall will enroll at Boston University as a Ph.D. student in computing and data science.

Written by John Tucker 

From beach trips with her family to one of the country's top science honors, Strauch found her passion where math meets the ocean.

A campus as landlocked as College Park might seem like an unlikely place to fall in love with the ocean again. But for Jenna Strauch, a sophomore at the University of Maryland pursuing bachelor's degrees in mathematics and atmospheric and oceanic science (AOSC), UMD turned out to be exactly the place where her childhood curiosity for the ocean came back to life.

This year, Strauch was awarded a 2026 Ernest F. Hollings Undergraduate Scholarship from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). One of the most competitive undergraduate honors available to students in the field, the scholarship provides up to $19,000 in financial support, professional development opportunities and a 10-week paid summer internship at any NOAA facility across the United States. Strauch was one of four UMD students in the College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences this year to receive the scholarship. This class—the second largest ever at UMD—brings the university's total number of Hollings Scholars since 2008 to 55.

"Hollings is such a goal to strive for in our field," said Strauch, who initially could not believe that she was chosen as a recipient. "I honestly thought it was far-fetched that I'd even have a chance, but I feel so honored to be part of this program. Even though plans aren't completely finalized yet, I know that I want to work on projects at the National Ocean Service involving marine ecosystems or coastal resilience."

When Strauch arrived at UMD in 2024 as a freshman mathematics major, she initially had plans to become a math teacher. But she had a hidden passion that she wanted to pursue as well.

"Growing up in Baltimore County, my family would always go to Ocean City every summer," Strauch recalled. "I knew as a kid that I loved the ocean and the shoreline, but I didn't really connect the dots that studying it was a viable path for me. It just seemed so distant from what I thought was possible for me. For a long time, I just assumed I would someday be a math teacher."

That began to change toward the end of her senior year of high school, when Strauch first learned about oceanography as a field of study. By the time she arrived at UMD, the idea had taken hold—and a conversation with the right professor made it real.

Strauch had enrolled in AOSC 200 through UMD's Weather and Climate Carillon Community, a living-learning program that brought her into Professor Tim Canty's classroom. It wasn't her first choice of community going in, but it quickly became her favorite. When Canty asked his students about their long-term goals, Strauch told him she was interested in the ocean. His response was immediate.

"He instantly told me to go talk to him outside of class about it," Strauch said. "It was obvious that he wanted to encourage me to pursue oceanography and that he had an idea how I could get started."

Canty introduced Strauch to Mesoterps, the student-led team behind UMD's Micronet, a distributed network of weather stations positioned across campus. The team collects hyperlocal atmospheric data and shares it with university facilities, emergency management offices and various campus partners—including the university's golf course, which relies on the network for real-time wind speed and direction readings. The Mesoterps team also works with facilities management on ongoing efforts to better understand rainfall patterns and their relationship to flooding risk in older campus buildings. 

For Canty, watching Strauch grow into the field has been a source of pride.

"I first met Jenna through my Carillon community, and I was thrilled to learn she would be adding AOSC as a second degree," Canty said. "She is incredibly talented, and I look forward to following her career and seeing the great things she accomplishes."

When Strauch officially joined the Micronet project in September 2024, she had no prior experience with this kind of work. But before long, her tasks included migrating the team's data infrastructure to a new server, troubleshooting Raspberry Pi computers when they went unexpectedly offline and performing routine maintenance on equipment spread across campus—work that was messier and more technical than anything she had ever encountered in a classroom.

The experience also opened Strauch's eyes to many aspects of fieldwork and research that she hadn't expected. Working remotely with sensors and mini-computers helped her see that she could uniquely apply her math skills in a highly modern, technological context. And seeing how many people across campus—especially outside of AOSC—were genuinely invested in what her team was doing only motivated her more.

Looking to the future, Strauch plans to take on a larger role with the Micronet team and hopes to pass on the same kind of knowledge she developed to new students in the group. She also enrolled in a physical oceanography course next semester, taught by Atmospheric and Oceanic Science Assistant Professor Jacob Wenegrat, as a more concrete step toward fulfilling her dreams of attending graduate school and becoming an oceanographer.

"I've just learned so much since I started working with the Micronet—things that I never would have learned just from taking classes—and I know that it'll still be a big part of my academic life here at UMD for the next few years," Strauch said. "I think that experience is what got me here, and I'm excited to see where it all leads."

Through multidisciplinary partnerships and a bit of weather science, Elana Fertig (M.S. ’05, Ph.D. ’07, applied mathematics & statistics, and scientific computation) aims to make cancer a predictable and manageable disease.

Elana Fertig (M.S. ’05, Ph.D. ’07, applied mathematics & statistics, and scientific computation) sees clear parallels between predicting the weather and forecasting cancer progression. Her landmark research involves using computational methods to identify cellular and molecular mechanisms of carcinogenesis and therapeutic resistance from a vast trove of multiplatform genomics data. 

After graduating from the University of Maryland, College Park, she spent 16 years as a faculty member at Johns Hopkins University, building a transdisciplinary lab and authoring over 130 research publications. 

In 2024, she was recruited to serve as director of the Institute for Genome Sciences (IGS) at the University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM). She is also a professor in the Division of Hematology/Oncology, associate director for quantitative science at the University of Maryland Marlene and Stewart Greenebaum Comprehensive Cancer Center (UMGCCC) at the University of Maryland Medical System (UMMS), and a faculty member at the University of Maryland Institute for Health Computing (UM-IHC). 

In this interview with UMD’s College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences, Fertig discusses her leadership roles, the value of partnerships and how applying weather science to cancer research may lead to bluer skies in human health. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Please describe your current roles.

I was recruited in 2024 to direct the IGS at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. IGS grew out of early genome sequencing efforts and is now a hub for genomics and computational biology at UMSOM. My role is to build on that foundation—advancing and applying genomics technologies and interpreting huge datasets mathematically.

I also serve as associate director for quantitative science at UMGCCC, where I help build computational programs and infrastructure for modern cancer research. We partner across the University of Maryland system, especially through UM-IHC, through which we’re working to better connect efforts between Baltimore and College Park, particularly in computational biology and artificial intelligence (AI).

What kinds of scientific questions are you trying to answer?

I often describe it as building a weather forecasting system for tumors. We want to move beyond averages and instead say: Given where your tumor is right now, this is the best treatment, here’s how it may evolve, and here’s how we’ll monitor it. Cancer is dynamic—it’s constantly changing—so we need to understand where it’s going, not just where it is.

You didn’t start out in biology—how did that shift happen?

As an undergraduate, I didn’t thrive in the hypercompetitive premedical environments, and memorizing biological details didn’t come naturally to me. I was drawn instead to the logic of mathematics and the collaboration that its complex questions demand.

What drew me to Maryland was that people were applying math to real-world data and problems. I came to study applied math, focusing on nonlinear and fluid dynamics—work closely tied to weather prediction. 

My graduate training was deeply collaborative. I worked with an interdisciplinary team, with Brian Hunt [Professor Emeritus of Mathematics with a joint appointment in the Institute for Physical Science and Technology] as my primary advisor. Through a NASA fellowship, I helped integrate satellite and weather balloon data into atmospheric models. That experience with combining different types of data shaped my approach going forward.

At that time, researchers were beginning to generate large-scale biological datasets that needed mathematicians to interpret. I realized the tools we used for weather prediction could apply to biology—especially the complexity of cancer biology and therapeutic resistance.

To expand my skills, I entered a postdoc in computational biology, and I was struck by how much we still don’t understand. In weather, you know the equations from well-established laws of fluid dynamics. In biology, we’re still grappling with what the variables even are. That complexity hooked me.

Much of my work now focuses on making sense of extremely high-dimensional data—measuring thousands of genes across millions of cells—and identifying what actually matters. We look for the key variables driving the system and how they change over time, particularly in cancer progression and treatment resistance.

What’s an example of a problem you’re working on?

We work a lot on pancreatic cancer. For example, many people develop precancerous lesions that never progress, so a key question is: Why do some become cancer while others don’t?

Another challenge is that much of a pancreatic tumor isn’t made up of tumor cells. It includes other cells that block the immune system. If we can figure out how the tumor shuts down the immune response, we may be able to design therapies that turn it back on.

What would a cancer “forecast” mean for patients?

It would shift cancer care away from one-time predictions based on averages, moving toward precision medicine, predictive medicine. The goal is to make cancer manageable over time, more like a chronic disease. In some cancers, like breast cancer, we’re already seeing that shift. There’s also a psychological benefit when you give patients a clearer sense of what to expect.

How is it being back in Maryland? 

It’s been very meaningful. It was humbling to step into the role previously held by Claire Fraser—even finding a pair of her shoes under my desk on my first day.

Maryland has a unique combination of strengths in nonlinear dynamics, genomics and predictive modeling—exactly what’s needed to build a tumor forecasting system. It’s the perfect place to deliver on the promise of these technologies.

What’s always stood out to me about Maryland is its emphasis on interdisciplinary work and real-world problems. You’re part of a larger effort to solve meaningful challenges, supported by connections to federal agencies, multiple campuses and a broad scientific community.

IGS already serves as a hub for systems biology across areas like cancer, infectious disease, aging and neurogenomics. I want to continue advancing new molecular profiling technologies and expanding their application. A big part of that is building bridges—across disciplines, campuses and partnerships like ours with the UM-IHC.

What has surprised you most in your career?

How quickly the technology has evolved! When I was in graduate school, the human genome hadn’t even been fully sequenced. Now measuring it is routine. And there were things that people told me would never be possible—like being able to measure all the cells in a tumor over time—and now we can do that.

How does your work connect to who you were as a kid?

It’s always felt like solving a puzzle. I loved puzzles growing up—jigsaw puzzles, logic problems—that’s just how my mind works. And this work feels like that, just at a different scale.

It’s also all about adapting and changing, as we do through our lives. Scientific puzzles and the tools are always evolving—the ability to keep learning is what lets you move between fields and keep up.

For this puzzle, we’re trying to piece together something incredibly complex. But I’ve learned that if you follow the logic step by step, eventually a beautifully clear picture starts to emerge.

Read more about the members of our community who have been honored recently for their outstanding contributions to the university and the field of mathematics.

Faculty

• Larry Washington receieves the  Kirwan Undergraduate Award
• Dan Cristofaro-Gardiner is the winner the 2025 Brin Prize in Dynamical Systems.
• The 2026 International Congress of Mathematics invited speakers:
  
  • Dima Dolgopyat - plenary speaker
  • Adam Kanigowski, Dan Cristofaro-Gardiner, and Uri Bader - invited speakers
    
  • Dan Cristofaro-Gardiner, Yu Gu, and Vince Lyzinski promoted to Professor
• Artem Chernikov awarded the Bessel Research Award by the Humboldt Foundation

Students

•  Hibiki Kato Dynamics Days US 2026 Poster Presentation Award and Student Conference Travel Award