Graduate students Valerie Beck and Georgina Moreno each have been awarded a 2011-12 National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Fellowship to pursue graduate studies at the University of Iowa.

Beck, a Ph.D. candidate in psychology, and Moreno, a Ph.D. candidate in neuroscience, each will receive three years of support from the NSF, including a $30,000 annual stipend, a $10,500 cost-of-education allowance, and international research and professional development opportunities.

“Receiving the NSF Fellowship will empower me to continue to focus on my research and allow me a certain amount of independence in choosing my research topics,” Beck said. “I feel incredibly honored to have received this fellowship.”

“This is a great opportunity. It opens a lot of doors,” Moreno said of the fellowship program, which supports outstanding Ph.D. students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

Beck studies how attention and working memory processes compete and interact to guide eye movements in both healthy young people and patients with Schizophrenia.

“Valerie, who just finished her first year as a Ph.D. student, came to the lab with well-established ideas for research projects, and these were adapted into the NSF proposal,” said Andrew Hollingworth, associate professor of psychology in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and Beck’s mentor. “She has implemented much of that work in the first year, and she is currently writing up multiple papers for publication. So, her success in applying for the fellowship is already being translated into research success.”

Moreno’s research focuses on the effects of stress on decision-making in healthy older adults. She is in the beginning stages of a study that will attempt to provide a better understanding of the mechanisms involved in this critical process of making stressful decisions, ranging from choosing the best driving route to making life-altering medical choices.

In August, Moreno traveled to Los Angeles to meet with faculty at UCLA to learn how to conduct clinical interviews with adult patients to ensure she acquires the appropriate stress-related information.

“She’s embarking on something that is entirely new to our lab with the study of stress and aging,” said Natalie Denburg, assistant professor of neurology in the Carver College of Medicine and Moreno’s faculty mentor in the neuroscience interdisciplinary graduate program. “She’s doing the first project in the lab on stress and aging. I was a little interested in stress and aging, but we discussed it together and she took off and became the expert on this topic in the lab.”

Moreno, who began her studies at the UI as Dean’s Graduate Fellow, has always been interested in how the brain changes throughout a person’s lifespan. Her interest is shared by many other people as well, including her fellow students in the neuroscience program.

“Everyone has a story to tell and can relate to aging, and a lot of people are interested in what the future holds,” Moreno said.

Because her research topic holds broad interest for many, Moreno and her colleagues find much to discuss. Such interactions enrich the learning environment.

“The program here is so integrative and so interdisciplinary. People in my cohort are all doing different things. We’re all very aware of what each other is doing.”