My Winning NDSEG Fellowship Submission

01 May 2026 • Tags: neuromorphic computing, graduate school

Recently, I won the National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) Fellowship. I’m excited to have more time to focus on research for the last 60% of my degree, and to be free from TAing in the future.

While I won, I don’t have much advice to give. Unfortunately, when you have an application with such a low success rate, so much of it comes down to luck. The only thing I can think of that I did differently is really knowing what the Army Research Lab’s request was looking for, which I could do because the ARL POC on the project I work on (https://hybrid-ai.umd.edu/) was the author of the document I wrote my NDSEG proposal for. Don’t worry, I didn’t meet him until 3 months after the deadline. I also chose my letter writers well, I think, including one that I had worked closely with at NASA and my former-DARPA advisor, since I thought they would have relevant government writing skills.

Even if I didn’t win, the NDSEG proposal was one of the most pivotal things I did during the second year of my PhD. Writing it, while talking to my advisors and letter writers, gave me significantly more direction for what I want to do for a thesis than anything else I did. I think it’s worth applying just for that feeling. You can read more about the research on the umd website or in the proposal.

Now that I’ve said that, we’ll see how much of my proposed work really gets to be part of my thesis. If anything, me and my lab are ahead of where I thought I would be, but neuroscience is just so much messier than I’m used to and I’m worried about ever getting results.

Now, for the part you’ve been waiting for. You can download my proposal here. Big thanks to whoever made an overleaf template, however, I extensively modified it. You can use it here. Make sure to use \documentclass[12pt]{article} on the first line to specify that you want 12pt font.