Madison Genslinger’s remarkable first year and two page profile is currently featured as the top news on the college news website.
We are incredibly proud of her. The full profile can be read here: https://news.iu.edu/college/live/news/52839-iu-grad-student-recipient-of-national-science
Text of the article below:
Madison Genslinger, a Ph.D. student in Chemistry in the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University Bloomington, is the recipient of a 2026 Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) award from the U..S. National Science Foundation, in Materials Research – Materials Theory, this year’s sole U.S. awardee in that category.
Sep 17, 2026
Madison Genslinger, a Ph.D. student in Chemistry in the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University Bloomington, approaches her research in materials science like a puzzle, one where the process matters as much as the solution.
“Each new step can provide a picture of the quantum behavior behind a material,” Genslinger said. “If you keep expanding, eventually you will know that material inside and out, but often it’s more interesting if you don’t know so you can keep trying to solve the puzzle.”
That approach has already produced two major honors for Genslinger, both arriving early in her graduate career, during her first year as a Ph.D student. This spring, Genslinger was named the sole recipient in the United States of a 2026 National Science Foundation (NSF)
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Graduate Research Fellowship Program award in Materials Research-Materials Theory, guaranteeing her three years of funding.
The NSF fellowship is considered the most prestigious graduate research recognition in the country, and Genslinger’s competition included Ph.D. students from chemistry, physics, chemical engineering and dedicated materials science and engineering departments at every major academic and research institution in America.
Materials research bridges fundamental chemistry, physics and real-world engineering, studying how to design and analyze solid substances with practical uses, from batteries to the materials inside microelectronics and solar panels. Materials theory relies on supercomputers to predict how those materials will behave before they’re built.
Genslinger is also an accomplished teacher. In her first semester at IU Bloomington, she taught Introduction to Physical Chemistry (CHEM-C-360), a course spanning thermodynamics and quantum mechanics. She won an Associate Instructor award, an honor given to just three Ph.D. students a year out of roughly 100 teaching across the department, typically awarded to students with a year or more of classroom experience.
“Teaching gives you the skills to evaluate what your student understands,” Genslinger said. “Presenting your research requires you to understand your audience, so you can scale your concepts when you present.”
Genslinger’s passion for teaching goes well beyond the classroom. She has developed novel 3D printed toys which explain basic aspects of materials’ research and her work. She will present these at both the College’s Science Fest on the IU Bloomington campus this coming October, and in collaboration with IU’s Center for Rural Engagement at events across Southern and Central Indiana.
Genslinger’s adviser, Assistant Professor of Chemistry Alexandru Georgescu, said he recognized her ability well before she set foot in Bloomington. Georgescu’s research group in the College was a recent recipient of a U.S. Department of Energy Early Career Research Program award, for their research into computational discovery and the study of quantum materials. Genslinger and Georgescu met during her visiting weekend in February 2025, while she was still working at Angstrom Technologies in Kentucky. She chose IU over offers from several top-five chemistry departments, drawn by the mentorship she saw in Georgescu’s group.
For example, in the months before her arrival that July, she read papers during lunch breaks at Angstrom and met virtually with Georgescu in the evenings to discuss them.
“Her questions often covered things I never thought about while reading the same material,” Georgescu said.
Once on campus, Genslinger moved quickly, designing her own theoretical project on quantum materials analysis within weeks of joining the Georgescu group, along with a new way to visualize how atoms bond in solids and a new methodology for AI-assisted quantum materials discovery. She presented that work at the American Physical Society’s Global Summit in March, has taken part in two quantum materials workshops this summer, and plans to audit a graduate-level math course this fall.
Genslinger is also the second consecutive graduate student from Georgescu’s group to win a teaching award while working under his mentorship, following Varsha Kumari, who is also the recipient of multiple departmental awards. Md Rajbanul Akhond, a Ph.D. student in the group, recently won an award for best first year research write-up in the department, and is the recipient of a John and Wendy Kindig Fellowship.
In addition, recent College alumna Emily Ward, now at Princeton University for her Ph.D., received an NSF GRFP in Materials Research – Chemistry of Materials for her work spanning both theory and experiment. Ward was co-advised by Sara Skrabalak, the James H. Rudy Professor and Robert & Marjorie Mann Chair of Chemistry, and Professor Georgescu.
For Georgescu, this pattern echoes a conversation he had years earlier with his own Ph.D. adviser, Yale’s Sohrab Ismail-Beigi.
“I was sharing with him the work one of my students did,” Georgescu recalled. “He stopped and asked, ‘Isn’t it nice that, as normal people, we get to be part of the journey of some really extraordinary people?’”
The grants and awards matter, but for Georgescu, they point to something more fundamental. Namely, that the creativity of students like Genslinger, paired with dedicated mentorship, produces outstanding achievements and outcomes for individuals and institutions alike.