University Fellows Award for Rishi Chandra

Rishi Chandra is the recipient of a University Fellows Award, a prestigious fellowship offered only to the University of Arizona's highest-ranked incoming graduate students. The award provides an annual stipend, tuition scholarship, and health coverage, in addition to professional development and networking opportunities.

Rishi graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a B.S. in physics and planetary science. His primary research interests lie in the analysis of solar system materials, including meteorites and returned samples from asteroids and the moon. He also plans to develop cheaply accessible smartphone virtual reality field trips to exotic geologic locales, such as the Antarctic dry valleys and the lunar surface, to inspire the next generation of geoscientists and to engage the public as the scientific community explores these distant frontiers. Aside from his academic interests, Rishi enjoys virtual motorsports, flight simulation, running, and science fiction literature.

by Rishi Chandra

The University Fellows Award goes to grad students from departments all over campus, and this year's cohort is a tight-knit group. We spent a night at Biosphere 2 for orientation and team-building, which was an unbelievable welcome to Arizona for me in my second week of classes. Through the semester, we have weekly seminars where experts speak with us about practical skills for grad students in any discipline: project management, human-centered design, mentorship and mentee-ship, and more. It's allowed me to connect with students in the humanities, arts, social sciences, and engineering, letting me to explore and present on topics I didn't expect myself to be curious about, such as human-ecosystem coevolution in the Sonoran Desert. It's also given me the opportunity to explore my own interests in new interdisciplinary ways, such as examining ways in which non-Western worldviews can inform Western scientists preparing for human exploration beyond low Earth orbit. Connecting with scholars from other disciplines has offered me new perspectives on familiar problems, so I'm excited to see where the connections I've made with my peers in the UF program lead me in the coming years.