Arianna Long wins Ford Foundation Fellowship
The honor also recognizes Long's efforts to lift up her field's next stars.
On June 1, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine announced its 2021 list of recipients of the Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship; only 40 students across the country and across disciplines get this fellowship, and this year the list includes UCI astrophysics Ph.D. student Arianna Long from the Department of Physics & Astronomy. The fellowship’s aim is to bolster the diversity of the professoriate in the country’s universities and colleges, and will give Long $28,000 during her final year to complete her dissertation on understanding how the most massive galaxies in the Universe form. Long uses telescopes like the Hubble Space Telescope and the Atacama Large Millimeter Array in Chile to understand so-called dusty galaxies that’re 10 to 100 times larger than our home Milky Way galaxy, and which may play a big part in the formation of the cosmic behemoths called galaxy clusters — groups of hundreds to thousands of galaxies bound together. This fellowship is in partial recognition of doctoral students who’re committed to enriching the education and experience of underrepresented students in academia. For Long, the fellowship recognizes her excellence in mentoring emerging scholars and in co-founding the Physics & Astronomy Community Excellence program — a UCI program that provides mentoring support for new graduate students in her department, and which, thanks in part to a recent grant, is now helping its mentors become the next leaders of their respective fields. “I’m honored to be selected for the 2021-2022 Ford Fellowship cohort,” Long said. “I hope to one day be leading a lab of my own, using both the scientific and mentoring expertise I learned while at UCI to support my future students. This opportunity allows me to focus on finishing my dissertation and to get a strong head start on my journey towards the professoriate.”