Graduate Student Accolades

Dijana Mujkanović (PhD '26) will begin a yearlong appointment as a Raphael Morrison Dorman Memorial Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard's Weatherhead Center for International Affairs this fall. 

Ryan Lindner, a master’s student in the School of Public and International Affairs, earned a 2026 Boren Award for International Study. This summer, Lindner is using his fellowship to study Russian at the Novamova Language School in Tbilisi, Georgia.

Leon Min, a second-year PhD student in the Department of Bioengineering and the School of Medicine’s Medical Scientist Training Program, has been awarded a prestigious fellowship to support his research on tissue-engineered vascular grafts.

Andrew Stricklin (ENGR ’23), a mechanical engineering PhD student in the Swanson School, and Lance Long, who is studying bioengineering in the Swanson School’s MS-to-PhD program, are among the five University of Pittsburgh students who earned the SMART Scholarship-for-Service, which provides merit-based scholarships from the U.S. government to bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral students seeking degrees in science, math, technology and engineering. 

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has named its 2026 class of Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) scholars, which includes 7 Pitt graduate students among the awardees and 3 more in its honorable mentions.

Pitt Public Health doctoral student Aubree McMahon has been selected to join the American Journal of Public Health (AJPH) Student Think Tank Fellowship for the 2026–2027 cohort.

Varun Shelke, a master’s student studying information science at SCI, was part of a team with four Pitt Business graduate students who took home first place in the Fall 2025 KPMG Cup Showcase.

When Yoni Preuss (MPA ’26) was awarded the Alex Yerkey Memorial Scholarship from the Southwest Section of the Pennsylvania Chapter of the American Planning Association (APA PA SW) in recognition of his commitment to the field of urban planning, it marked the next step in a journey he traces back to a summer spent studying in Berlin, Germany. 

Research led by Daniel Ivanov, a physics and astronomy graduate student in the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences at Pitt, uncovered a contender for one of the earliest observed spiral galaxies containing a stellar bar, a sometimes-striking visual feature that can play an important role in a galaxy’s evolution.

From the campaign trail to city hall, second-year Master of Public Administration (MPA) student David Bilger is putting public service into action—and being recognized for his impact.