Three Chemistry students awarded National Science Foundation fellowships

three people

Theodore Berger, Samuel Charney, and Erin Lulu Li

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has selected three Yale Chemistry students for its prestigious Graduate Research Fellowship Program.

Graduate students Theodore Berger and Erin Lulu Li and undergraduate student Samuel Charney were chosen for the fellowship because their research is on the path to making significant advancements.

The five-year fellowship is a major achievement, as it provides three years of financial support, including an annual stipend of $37,000 and a $16,000 educational allowance. 

Learn more about the fellows’ research below.

Meet the NSF Fellows:

person in pink shirt

Theodore Berger 

First-Year Ph.D. student
Advisor: Professor Gregory Craven

Research: “In the Craven Lab, we design small molecule inhibitors and chemical tools to probe and perturb dysregulated signaling pathways. Specifically, my research focuses on exploiting covalent chemistry to target disease-causing lysine mutations, such as in cancer and autoimmune disorders. By synthesizing and assessing the candidacy of salicylaldehyde-based small molecules as lysine-selective electrophiles, I aim to expand druggable space and identify novel therapeutic treatments for medicinally relevant pathologies.”

person in suit

Samuel Charney 

Senior Undergraduate Student
Advisor: Professor Seth Herzon

Research: “My research at Yale in the Herzon Lab has been on total synthesis of bioactive natural products. This involves the development of synthetic routes to access the complex molecular scaffolds. I plan to continue research in this field when I begin my Ph.D. at MIT following graduation from Yale this spring. Total synthesis provides insight into the mechanism of action of natural products, enabling researchers to elucidate the binding target and potentially uncover novel biological pathways implicated in disease. It also allows us to sharpen chemical logic by studying the reactivity and bioactivity that emerge from the interplay of complex functional groups.”

person in pink shirt

Erin Lulu Li 

First-Year Ph.D. student
Advisor: Professor Seth Herzon

Research: “Research in the Herzon Lab aims to explore the emergent properties of complex natural products to improve our understanding of biological processes and tackle relevant unmet medical needs. My project focuses on using synthetic organic chemistry to investigate a natural product scaffold that could be leveraged for chemoselective lysine modification. This research will contribute to the future development of next-generation inhibitors targeting disease-relevant proteins acting via these residues, potentially allowing for advances in therapeutic development.”

The following students received honorable mentions from the NSF: Jonathan Giller (Craven Lab) and Hovnan Simonyan (Bartholomew and Hazari Labs).