Mr Bollen said his New Zealand Post scholarship, providing $5000 for a year, had been a "massive surprise" and was helping him to complete his master's research.
The extra funding meant he could travel to Switzerland to attend the Scientific Committee on Scientific Research Open Science Conference, and to Stanford University, California.
Mr Fan, a doctoral student, will receive $10,000 over each of two years for his Antarctica New Zealand doctoral scholarship.
Both will also receive return flights and field trips to the Antarctic through Antarctica New Zealand.
Mr Bollen was last year invited to sail to the Southern Ocean with an oceanography research group from Stanford University.
He is studying the layers of life - microscopic algae called diatoms - that have died and settled into the sediment over the past million years.
The scholarship will enable him to travel to the Antarctic to look at life growing underneath sea ice, with Associate Prof Ken Ryan, of Victoria University of Wellington.
Mr Fan, who moved to Dunedin from China just over a year ago, is using soundwaves to measure the ice structure and how it moves under different stress, in a new and "really exciting" research approach.