Two Montana State University students win prestigious NSF Graduate Research Fellowships

BOZEMAN - Two students who each earned dual degrees in Montana State University's College of Letters and Science while conducting undergraduate research have been awarded prestigious Graduate Research Fellowships from the National Science Foundation.

Senior Derek Jollie, who will graduate in May with bachelor's degrees in physics and mathematical sciences, and Heath Caldwell, who graduated in 2025 with degrees in earth sciences and biological sciences, are among the 2,500 of nearly 14,000 applicants from across the United States to receive the highly competitive awards in 2026.

The NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program provides financial support to graduate students who have demonstrated potential for significant achievements in research in science, technology, engineering or mathematics, or STEM, disciplines. The five-year fellowships provide three years of financial support, including an annual stipend of $37,000 and an education allowance of $16,000 for tuition and fees.

The esteemed awards are far from the first for Jollie and Caldwell. As MSU juniors, each received the Barry Goldwater Scholarship that honors the nation's top undergraduates pursuing research in STEM fields. Both also received financial awards for their undergraduate studies at MSU, Caldwell as a Presidential Scholar and Jollie as a Montana University System Honor Scholar and Hilleman Scholar. The MSU Hilleman Scholars Program is designed for Montana residents who demonstrate significant academic, leadership and career potential.

Jollie, who is originally from Butte, will begin his doctoral studies in the fall at UCLA, where he spent the past two summers conducting research through another NSF-funded program, the Research Experience for Undergraduates. He was encouraged to apply to graduate school at UCLA by his adviser and mentor Scott McCalla, associate professor in MSU's Department of Mathematical Sciences, who praised Jollie's initiative, motivation, innovative curiosity and deep intellect.

At UCLA, Jollie was advised by professor Hayden Schaeffer, the director of Applied Mathematics.

"Derek is among the strongest undergraduate students I've worked with," Schaeffer said. "His academic work and research show solid curiosity and discipline, along with a thoughtful approach to his studies. The department looks forward to having Derek join the program in the fall."

Jollie has been involved in undergraduate research since he was a freshman. As a member of a group led by Brian D'Urso, associate professor in the Department of Physics, he worked to develop new components for levitated optomechanics experiments, in which small objects are suspended by magnetic fields and measured with light. After realizing he liked math more than physics, Jollie began researching dynamical systems - the study of things that change in time, such as the functions of gravity - with McCalla.

"Dr. McCalla has been an amazing mentor," Jollie said. "He's there to talk to when some weird thing arises in research, and he usually lets me work it out on my own. That prepares me for a lot of the struggles to come."

Jollie's doctoral work will focus on mathematical applications to physics and include further development of his current work to identify the equation for a levitating particle using stochastic differential equations. His goal, he said, will be to go deeper into predicting physical models using - and bettering - machine learning techniques.

McCalla said that Jollie already has developed datasets that eventually will be posted to the Common Task Framework of the NSF-funded AI Institute in Dynamic Systems at the University of Washington. His contributions will be used as benchmark datasets to push the field of scientific machine learning forward.

Among his other notable achievements, Jollie has published one paper as the primary author and has another paper under review. He also has given talks at MSU, UCLA, in Hawaii and in the Netherlands. He said he aspires to a career in academia so that he can continue doing more of the same.

"Honestly, I like the whole thing. I like learning, I like getting to travel, I like giving talks, and the research is good," he said.

Earlier this month, Jollie was awarded the Dean's Award for Academic Excellence, recognizing him as the College of Letters and Science's outstanding graduating senior in the sciences for 2026.

Caldwell, originally from Clancy, is finishing his first year at North Carolina State University, where he is pursuing a Ph.D. in biological sciences with a focus on vertebrate paleontology.

Just outside the entrance to his lab at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences stands a model skeleton of a dinosaur dug up just outside Ekalaka. That's where Caldwell, as a youth, was introduced to the field of paleontology and where he volunteered for several summers at the Carter County Museum.

"Every day I go into the museum and have that reminder of where I started," he said.

When he is in the lab, Caldwell also is reminded of his time at MSU. He said many of the specimens being researched there came from Montana, and his lab regularly collaborates with researchers at MSU and Museum of the Rockies. He credits that and his other experiences at MSU for the success of his NSF fellowship application.

"Because the application process was at the start of my Ph.D., my personal statement about research I'd done was pretty much my undergraduate research at MSU and my volunteer work," he said. "I owe a lot of thanks to MSU."

One of his several undergraduate research projects included comparing the timing of bone fusion in modern emus to bone fusion in the bird-like dinosaur, Troodon. His paper on the results was published last summer in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, the flagship publication of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology.

Now finishing his first year in the doctoral program at NCSU, Caldwell said the funding provided by the research fellowship will cover his living expenses and allow him to attend scientific conferences and travel to museums around the world to examine specimens. His research is focused on how dinosaur communities changed during a significant climate change event about 100 million years ago.

"It was one of the hottest periods in Earth's history in the past 500 million years," he said. "We're having global warming right now, and if we can compare ecosystems before and after climate change in the past, it might tell us what's going to happen to modern ecosystems."

Caldwell also continues to collaborate on projects with David Varricchio, MSU professor of paleontology in the Department of Earth Sciences. They are working together on another paper describing Troodon, which is currently being considered for publication.

"Heath was a great undergraduate student, and he is an excellent writer and scholar," Varricchio said. "His award from the NSF is well-deserved - they gave it to the right person."