Ph.D. Students Named NSF Fellows

Ph.D. Students Named NSF Fellows Alex Coughlin Tue, 06/09/2026 - 10:36

Ph.D. Students Named NSF Fellows

Jun 04, 2026

Current Berkeley Statistics Ph.D students Abdullah Ateyeh and Claire Macnamara Morton have been named 2026 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Programaward winners.

2,500 Graduate Research Fellowships winners were selected from a highly competitive pool of nearly 14,000 applicants nationwide for the 2026-2027 academic year. NSF Fellowships are awarded to outstanding graduate students across the United States who are pursuing research-based degrees in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

Ateyeh’s research focuses on problems at the intersection of machine learning and causal inference, as well as each field individually. This summer, he is working with Associate Professor Avi Feller on research exploring how AI systems can help design and run more efficient experiments, particularly through the use of synthetic data. Since arriving at Berkeley, Ateyeh has worked on several projects in the theory of transformers, including studying latent contexts, understanding training dynamics, and exploring connections between matrix masking, attention mechanisms, and training and decoding efficiency. Prior to arriving at Berkeley, he earned his B.S. from Caltech.

Morton is interested in developing causal inference and spatial statistics methods for environmental justice applications. Prior to Berkeley, she was a pre-doctoral research fellow at the Stanford RegLab. Morton has a B.S. in Mathematical and Computational Science with a minor in Environmental Justice from Stanford.

• Alex Coughlin