Science and Engineering Scholarships and Fellowships Blog

“Involvement in the LSAMP program impacted my experience in a number of ways. Because of my involvement, I was introduced to highly motivated and competitive minority students in the college, which motivated me to perform better.”

Reginald Covington is a Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation (LSAMP) scholarship recipient, and currently a PhD student at Cornell University studying Economics. Covington spent four years in the Marines before braving the University of Maryland to study Mathematics and Economics and beginning to forge a road of great academic accomplishment.

Covington admits the transition from Marine to college student was difficult but if his numerous awards since enrolling at the University of Maryland are any indication, he successfully overcame any initial transition troubles. He received a scholarship from the James A. Yorke Young Scientists and the PRIME Service Scholarship from the University of Maryland’s College of Mathematics and Physical Sciences (CMPS). He also received the Maryland Space Grant Scholarship from the Maryland Space Grant Consortium.

Covington has continued to give back to young people in his community. He devoted a great deal of his time to Beyond These Walls and the Upward Bound Saturday Academy, both organizations where he mentored young minority students in his community. Covington says that his long-term goals are to teach and empower young minority college students as a faculty member of a Historically Black College or University (HBCU) and to better understand the socio-economic disparities among communities of color.

* This information is from the University of Maryland’s News Desk and the LSAMP alumni page on the University of Maryland’s website

Related: NYC LSAMP Alumni becomes GRF Recipient in Electrical Engineering – Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation (LSAMP) scholarship, our LSAMP overview post

“I want to build robotic vision systems that understand the visual world around them.”

Tomasz Malisiewicz is currently a third year PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and a recent recipient of the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. Malisiewicz did his undergraduate work at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, graduating with a dual major in Computer Science and Physics and a minor in Mathematics.

Malisiewicz used his NSF Fellowship to study at Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute. He is studying Machine Learning and Computer Vision although his main interest is in the later, especially in the application of machine learning techniques for detecting and segmenting objects in real scenes. On his profile for CMU’s Robotics Institute profile page Malisiewicz explains, “I study computer vision, and I am interested in the problems of unsupervised image segmentation and object recognition. I enjoy applying machine learning techniques to vision problems in combination with large amounts of training data. I am also interested in statistical text modeling and knowledge extraction from unstructured text.”

One of Maliziewicz’s most notable accomplishments was when he secured a coveted Software Engineering Internship at Google in the Summer of 2008. There he focused on the computer vision problems Google was encountering. He was also a student researcher from February to May of 2008 at Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS) in Paris as part of the WILLOW Research Team.

Related: NSF Fellowship, Carnegie Mellon Robotic’s Institute, WILLOW Research Team, École Normale Supérieure de Paris

“I am giving many public lectures, to help the public understand the work we have done and hope to do in the future, and to inspire young people to be as excited about science as I am.” Dr. John Mather

Dr. John Mather is currently a Senior Astrophysicist in the Observational Cosmology Laboratory at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. He attended Swarthmore College in 1964 and in 1968 was a recipient of National Science Foundation Fellowship which he used to fund his master’s and doctoral degree in physics at University of California, Berkeley.

As a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, he led the proposal efforts on the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE). The success of COBE was the outcome of prodigious team work involving more than 1,000 researchers, engineers and other participants. John Mather lead the project and was the main party responsible for the experiment that revealed the blackbody form of the microwave background radiation measured by COBE. His colleague, Dr. George Smoot, had the main responsibility for measuring the small variations in the temperature of the radiation on the COBE project.

In 2006 Dr. John Mather and Dr. George Smoot were recognized jointly for their exemplary work on COBE and received the Nobel Prize in Physics. From the years 1980 to 2006 Dr. Mather wrote The Very First Light on the process of creating COBE and continued his work with NASA on The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which would be his passion for years to come. The JWST is now planned for launch in 2013. Mather’s role as “senior project scientist” means he chairs the science working group and ensures the mission will meet the scientific requirements. The observatory is fine-tuned to search for extra-solar planets, dark matter and dark energy. The JWST’s infrared cameras will also detect the faint light from the first stars and galaxies to form in the universe, over 13 billion years ago.

* This information is from The Nobel Foundation and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

Related: NSF Graduate Research Fellow Profiles – NobelPrize.org – NSF Graduate Research Fellow Profile – Burton Richter