EESC doctoral student Ishita Pal receives NASA graduate student grant

Earth and Energy Sciences PhD student, Ishita Pal, has received the prestigious Future Investigators in NASA Earth and Space Science and Technology (FINESST) grant to fund her graduate education. She was one of 32 graduate students out of 224 applicants in the Planetary Science division to receive this grant. The $148,498 grant has been awarded for a three-year period and covers her stipend, tuition, publication costs, and travel to national and international research conferences. Earlier this year, Ishita also won the Lunar and Planetary Institute's Career Development Award for outstanding first author abstract submission to the 53rd Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. In August, she received a NASA Planetary Sciences Division Travel Grant for presenting a talk at the 85th Annual Meeting of the Meteoritical Society in Glasgow, Scotland.

Ishita works under the guidance of Dr. Manavi Jadhav in the Department of Physics on understanding the various nucleosynthesis processes that make heavy elements in stars. They carry out the necessary heavy element isotopic measurements on stardust/presolar grains with a Resonance Ionization Mass Spectrometer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.