Graduate student Kim Calabrese has been selected for a Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation, one of the most competitive and respected fellowships in the country.
Calabrese is pursuing a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics at UC Davis. Their research, conducted with Professor David Doty in Computer Science, investigates the theoretical foundations of chemical computing—a field that imagines chemical reaction networks as programmable systems. By treating chemical interactions as a kind of computational language, Calabrese’s work asks a fundamental and forward‑looking question:
“What behaviors can we design synthetic chemicals to perform, and how can modeling choices capture what systems are effectively implementable"
This NSF fellowship recognizes both the promise of that work and the creativity driving it. It’s an outstanding achievement and a proud moment for the UC Davis applied math community.