Donglai Yang, a second-year PhD student in geophysics at the EAS advised by Winnie Chu, was selected as the iHARP Polar Informatics graduate fellow for 2025, one of the two recipients among the inaugural cohort.

The iHARP Polar Informatics fellowship is awarded to graduate researchers who combine data science and polar science to promote physics-informed, data-driven discoveries. The award provides him one year of full funding and an opportunity to be co-mentored by researchers from iHARP participating institutes.

A member of the Polar Geophysical Simulation Lab, Donglai currently studies the thermodynamics of Antarctic Ice Sheet by combining ice-penetrating radar observations, numerical ice sheet models, and physics-informed machine learning. The fellowship will facilitate collaborations with computational glaciologists at Dartmouth College to better image the temperature of Antarctic Ice Sheet at its base, which critically controls the ice sheet motion and its contribution to future sea level rise.

iHARP is a part of NSF Harnessing the Data Revolution (HDR) institute community with specific focus on the polar regions.