Masis Named National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow

Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) second-year doctoral student Tessa Masis has been named a recipient of a 2023 National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship.  

Masis' research focuses on natural language processing (NLP) and computational social science. Specifically, they are interested in improving NLP tools to better serve speakers of nonstandard and primarily spoken languages, applying computational methods to conduct sociolinguistic analysis of language data, as well as investigating questions about human storytelling in both spoken and written forms.  

Established in 1952, the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program is the longest-running program of its kind. It invests in the upcoming generation of STEM professionals in the United States, recruiting talented scientists and engineers in the initial stages of their careers and granting awardees financial assistance for their graduate research studies in STEM fields. The fellowship provides three years of financial support across five years, including a yearly grant of $37,000 and a $12,000 cost of education allowance.   

Masis is advised by Associate Professor Brendan O'Connor and currently serves as a research assistant in the CICS Statistical Social Language Analysis Lab and UMass NLP (Natural Language Processing Group). They received their undergraduate degree in computational linguistics from UMass Amherst in 2020.