University of New Mexico graduate student Easwar Narayanan has been selected as a recipient of the 2022-23 Chateaubriand Fellowship, a prestigious grant offered by the Embassy of France in the United States in support of outstanding Ph.D. students from U.S. institutions who wish to conduct part of their doctoral research in France.
Narayanan, who was recently notified of the award by the French Embassy, is the first-ever UNM physics student to win the prestigious award. He will relocate to the Irene-Joliot Curie Laboratory in Paris where he will participate in the development of detectors destined for operation in the ATLAS Experiment at the Large Hadron Collider in Bern, Switzerland.
Chateaubriand Fellows are selected through a merit-based competition with expert evaluation in France and the United States. Narayanan begins his fellowship Sept. 1, 2022 and will spend a period of time from 4 to 9 months in France.
The program is divided into two sub-programs, the Chateaubriand Fellowship in Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics & Biology-Health (STEM) and Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS). Narayanan was awarded his fellowship for doctoral students in the STEM-area which aims to initiate or reinforce collaborations, partnerships or joint projects between French and American research teams.
Since its creation in 1981, more than 850 American students have been awarded the Chateaubriand Fellowship. Throughout the years, support was provided to postdoctoral students as well as doctoral students, but since 2010 the program has funded doctoral students exclusively. Each year, 40-50 students in STEM and health fields and 15-20 students in the Humanities and Social Sciences perform research in France with funding from the Chateaubriand Fellowship.
This fellowship is offered by the Office for Science & Technology (OST) of the Embassy of France in partnership with American universities and French research organizations such as Inserm and Inria. It is a partner of the National Science Foundation’s GROW program.
For more information, visit Chateaubriand Fellowship.