Virginia Collier has been awarded both the 2019 NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and the National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) Fellowship, and has accepted the NDSEG fellowship. Her research focuses on the coupling of chemistry and mechanics, using computational techniques to understand the behavior of high-temperature materials in jet engines. As a member of Professor Matt Begley's group, Virginia's current project models the impact of oxidation and volatilization processes on mechanical behavior in silicon carbide-based ceramic matrix composites (CMCs).