NSF Fellowship Opens Doors for Will Noll

Will Noll, who will begin Carnegie Mellon University’s Neural Computation Ph.D. program this fall, has received the 2024 National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship (GRFP).

The NSF GRFP is designed to aid high-achieving, full-time graduate students who are pursuing research-based master’s and doctoral degrees in a STEM field. Fellows are selected based on their work that demonstrates their potential to make remarkable contributions in their STEM field. The goal of the GRFP is to help the United States establish a lively, quality-based and diverse STEM workforce.

Noll recently graduated from Arizona State University with a bachelor’s degree in engineering and biomedical engineering and a minor in statistics.

“The highly competitive NSF pre-doctoral fellowship program identifies truly promising young scholars who are not only bright and capable scientists, but who are able to communicate the importance of their work. Receiving an NSF GRFP fellowship serves as an early indicator of success,” said Barbara Shinn-Cunningham, director of the Carnegie Mellon Neuroscience Institute and Cowan Professor of Auditory Neuroscience. “This prestigious award distinguishes students as exceptional, even among the talented individuals entering graduate school.

The fellowship focuses on intellectual merit — what the applicant may accomplish regarding their research — and broader impacts — their potential contributions to society through volunteering, teaching and outreach.

“Applying for pre-doctoral fellowships like the NSF GRFP requires significant effort, but the process itself provides invaluable experience in proposal writing and idea development,” said Shinn-Cunningham. “Additionally, being awarded a competitive fellowship offers recognition and support, granting students greater flexibility in choosing their research directions.”

Enhancing Research Tools to Understand the Brain

Noll plans to leverage brain-computer interfaces as a research tool to learn more about how the brain controls movement while integrating sensory feedback.

“I will work with Macaque monkeys to study neural representations of motor learning and motor intent. I am also excited about combining interdisciplinary fields of signal processing and machine learning to find new ways of analyzing neural population activity,” Noll said.

In the long term, Noll aims to explore how brain-computer interfaces can be used as a tool for neurorehabilitation to help individuals with spinal cord injury, neuromuscular disorders or blindness.

“Once you know the neural activity going on, you can make certain mappings and design experiments to learn more about how the brain controls movements, which influences those rehabilitation devices,” said Noll. “If you know more about the brain and the underlying systems, you can design better algorithms to drastically improve the performance of clinical brain-computer interfaces (BCIs).” 

Moving Research Forward

The fellowship will support Noll’s research by providing him with ample funding and flexible lab time.

“This is a substantial and prestigious fellowship, and it can really open doors for students,” said Steven M. Chase, associate professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and the Neuroscience Institute and Noll’s Ph.D. advisor. “Will is amazingly proactive. Although he officially matriculates in the fall semester, he reached out to see if he could start work over the summer, and he’s really hit the ground running.”

“The day that I knew decisions were going to come out to the awardees, I kept refreshing the website page,” said Noll. “Winning also made me feel more relaxed because I can use the fellowship to perform research in a laboratory which would be a great fit in research interests, culture, and productivity.” 

Noll will receive a three-year annual stipend that will augment funding from the university to help cover tuition and related expenses over the five-year fellowship period. He will also have access to professional development opportunities as a part of the fellowship.

Noll stated that if any students want advice or feedback on their applications to please reach out to him directly. 

Julia Ostrowski, a Ph.D. student in the Neuroscience Institute, received an honorable mention for the award and received the Sutherland-Merlino Fellowship last year.