Two Yale juniors - Dana Feldman and Usmaan Siddiqi - are among the 454 U.S. college students awarded Goldwater Scholarships for the 2026-27 academic year. The scholarships, named for the late U.S. Senator Barry Goldwater, encourage students to pursue research careers in the fields of natural sciences, engineering, and mathematics.
The scholarships are supported by the Goldwater Foundation and by an ongoing partnership with UWorld and the U.S. Department of Defense National Defense Education Program.
The Yale awardees were selected from a pool of more than 5,000 college sophomores and juniors who were nominated by 482 academic institutions. Virtually every scholarship recipient has said that they intend to obtain a Ph.D. as their highest degree. The cohort of scholars includes 59 who received the scholarship as sophomores last year and will receive a second year of support.
Dana Feldman, who was born and raised in New York, is majoring in chemistry at Yale. Since her first year, she has worked with Patrick Holland, the Conkey P. Whitehead Professor of Chemistry in Yale's Faculty and Arts and Sciences, and Simon Suhr, a Feodor Lynen Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale, on developing transition metal complexes to mediate electrocatalytic proton-coupled electron transfer. Through a fellowship from the German Research Foundation, she has also worked with Ulf-Peter Apfel at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum on the integration of cobalt, nickel, and copper salen complexes into gas diffusion electrodes for carbon dioxide electroreduction.
Last summer, Feldman worked with Cyrille Costentin at the Université Grenoble Alpes to reveal self-inhibitory effects in the CO₂ reduction mechanism of a cobalt electrocatalyst. Her current work in the Holland Group at Yale explores reductive non-innocence in iron salen complexes, and she is also collaborating with Rinaldo Poli of the Université de Toulouse on computational studies of cobalt-catalyzed hydrogen atom transfer.
Feldman is a Yale Engineering and Science (YES) Scholar who has worked as a peer mentor in Yale's Department of Chemistry, a peer tutor for chemistry, calculus, and French courses, and volunteer for numerous departmental and university STEM outreach organizations. Outside of chemistry, she is also majoring in comparative literature and has written pieces in (or translated works from) French, German, and Yiddish for undergraduate publications.
Usmaan Siddiqi is majoring in Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology (MCDB) on the Biotechnology track. As a Hahn Scholar, he conducts research in the laboratory of Jennifer Kwan, an assistant professor of medicine at the Yale School of Medicine, on clonal hematopoiesis and multi-omic biomarkers as predictors of chemotherapy-induced cardiotoxicity. He also works in the Hibino Lab at University of Chicago Medicine on computational modeling and tissue engineering of vascular grafts for congenital heart disease and in the Alam Lab at Northwestern Medicine on U.S. Foo and Drug Administration (FDA)- commissioned investigations into AI-based skin lesion analyzers. He serves as an engineering intern at BiVACOR, Inc., a California-based medical technology manufacturer, contributing to device development and FDA regulatory efforts for a total artificial heart, and he independently develops novel cardiac devices and mechanical circulatory support systems.
At Yale, he is a peer tutor for the introductory biology sequence (a year-long program for prospective science majors and pre-med students), MCDB peer mentor, and former fellow and executive board member of the Yale Helix biomedical incubator. He also continues to work broadly across the life sciences startup ecosystem, spanning AI, biotech, and medical devices. After graduation, Siddiqi intends to pursue a career as a physician-scientist at the intersection of biomedical engineering, cardiovascular medicine, and translational technology.
