Computer Science MS/PhD student, Araly Barrera, won the prestigious National Science Foundation graduate research fellowship in April 2010. The fellowship is for three years. Araly's research proposal was on Automatic Text Summarization under the mentorship of Prof. Rakesh Verma. Araly started this research as a summer REU student in the computer science department last year. From the NSF web site: "NSF Graduate Research Fellowships are three-year fellowships for graduate study leading to research-based masters and doctoral degrees." The fellowships are awarded in an annual competition. "Since 1952 NSF has awarded 42,000 fellowships out of more than 500,000 applicants."