Anoklase Ayitou, graduate student in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, has been awarded a prestigious and highly competitive National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. In awarding the fellowship, the National Science Foundation noted that Anoklase’s selection “was based on your outstanding abilities and accomplishments, as well as your potential to contribute to strengthening the vitality of the U.S. science and engineering enterprise.” He is the third student from NDSU to receive the fellowship.

The NSF Graduate Research Fellowship is awarded for a three-year period from 2010-13 and carries a total award of $90,000 and $31,500 for total research related expenses. Anoklase completed his second year as a graduate student at NDSU with guidance from Professor Sivaguru Jayaraman, recipient of the NSF CAREER Award and 2010 Swiss Chemical Society’s Grammaticakis-Neumann Prize.

Anoklase also received a UNCF-Merck Science initiative grant earlier this year and is a Global Center of Excellence fellow at Osaka University, Osaka, Japan. “It is really a privilege to have a student of Anoklase’s caliber in my group,” commented Professor Sivaguru Jayaraman. Anoklase’s doctoral work involves the use of light to synthesize chiral molecules (molecules that are not superimposable on their mirror image). Anoklase has published scientific papers in four peer-reviewed journals to date, two of which are in the prestigious Journal of the American Chemical Society.

The NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in NSF-supported science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines who are pursuing research-based master’s and doctoral degrees in the U.S. and abroad.