Science and Engineering Scholarships and Fellowships Blog

8 Honored in NSF Graduate Research Fellow Search

Utah State University hit a new record in 2010 for the most students and alumni it’s had recognized by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship in one year. This year alone has been eight USU students honored, with four receiving an honorable mention and four receiving an award. The four students who received an award are Melissa Jackson (geology), Nathan Carruth (physics), Joanna Hsu (ecology), and Jan Marie Andersen (physics).

Melissa Jackson

Melissa Jackson, courtesy of Utah State University

Jackson has been studying Prehistoric Barrier Canyon Style (BCS) rock art using optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating to determine the age of the alluvial terraces. She plans to continues her study and usage of OSL and developing a protocol to expand the age range it’s capable of dating by using loess deposits. Jackson’s graduate study will take place at Wales’ Aberystwyth University. During her time at USU, her other honors included being named Spring’s 2010 Valedictorian for the College of Science, a USU Presidential Scholarship, and receiving fourth place as part of USU’s Soils Team during national competitions in 2009 and 2010.

Joanna Hsu

USU graduate student Hsu is working with her advisor, Peter Adler, to study the relationship between precipitation and primary production.

“Primary production – how much green stuff plants are making – sets the amount of energy available for all organisms in an ecosystem,” Hsu says. “It’s also an important component of the global carbon cycle. Changes in precipitation patterns across the globe will impact primary production. The goal of my research is to find out just how large that impact will be.”

Nathan Carruth

Carruth, a USU graduate student finishing his master’s degree  at the time of the application, had previously received two Honorable Mentions before receiving the award this year. While at USU, Carruth studied time with his faculty mentor Charles Torre.

“Among the questions we’re asking is ‘Is it possible for time to be discrete; is it necessarily continuous?’” Carruth says.

. . . Carruth will soon choose between offers of continued graduate study at University of California-Santa Barbara, University of California-Berkeley and England’s Cambridge University.

Jan Marie Andersen

After graduating from USU with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and physics, Andersen went to the University of Copenhagen’s Niels Bohr Institute on a Fulbright Student Scholarship. Andersen is now studying low-mass stars called M-dwarfs at Boston University.

“Many astronomers filter out M-dwarfs as unwanted interference in their searches for larger, brighter celestial objects,” says Andersen, who was named 2007 College of Science Undergraduate Researcher of the Year. “But our studies of M-dwarfs could yield important clues about the early universe. One astronomer’s trash is another astronomer’s treasure.”

Photo Courtesy of Rollins College

Nicholas Horton, a physics major and chemistry minor from the Rollins College Class of 2009, was recently awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program award and the East Asia and Pacific Summer Institutes (EAPSI) fellowship.

Nicholas recently completed his first year of graduate study at Cornell University in Applied Physics. He also received in December 2009, The Cornell University Presidential Life Sciences Fellowship, a program intended to help form integrative new disciplines within the life sciences and to expand and support students’ interdisciplinary interests.

“According to the National Science Foundation, the GRFP program aims to ensure the vitality of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics in the United States and to reinforce its diversity by offering approximately 1,654 graduate fellowships. The Graduate Research Fellowship provides three years of support for graduate study leading to research-based masters or doctoral degrees and is intended for students who are in the early stages of their graduate study. The fellowship also provides a stipend for international travel, as well as financial support to the student’s institution”.

“As an EASPI, Horton will be performing optics research in Taiwan for eight weeks this summer. The primary goals of EAPSI are “to introduce students to East Asia and Pacific science and engineering in the context of a research setting, and to help students initiate scientific relationships that will better enable future collaboration with foreign counterparts.”

Horton credits Jay Shivamoggi, Director of the Office of External and Competitive Scholarships, for the counsel and guidance she provided him at Rollins.

“Dr. Jay’s application advice helped strengthen my GRFP and EAPSI applications,” said Horton.

While at Rollins, Horton was a Cornell Scholar and a 2008 Goldwater Scholarship recipient.

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photo of Erica Brown, University of Oklahoma

OU student Erica Brown gets fellowship

Erica Brown, a University of Oklahoma honors student from Oklahoma City, has been awarded a 2010 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. The award offers $30,000 per 12-month fellowship year for a maximum of three years.

Brown has a 3.95 grade point average and will graduate summa cum laude in May with a degree in chemical engineering after being named a Goldwater Scholar last year. She plans to pursue a doctorate in biomedical engineering at Duke University.

“The well-deserved fellowship being awarded to Erica Brown is one of the most prestigious recognitions in the entire country that can be given to an undergraduate science or engineering student,” said OU President David Boren.

Her research experience includes work with stem cells in tissue engineering at OU and a National Science Foundation-sponsored Research Experience for Undergraduates internship at Cornell University to create a biodegradable nanofiber mesh for tissue engineering purposes.

She has given numerous presentations at OU, Cornell and national conferences in St. Louis and Philadelphia.

Related: The NSF Graduate Fellowships Class of 1952 – Two BYU seniors take NSF Fellowships to MIT – Nine Dartmouth alumni given 2007 NSF Graduate Fellowships – NSF Awardees Use Algorithm to Explain Scientific Laws

photo of Tom Morrell, Hamilton College senior

Phillip Milner ’10 and Tom Morrell ’10, of were awarded NSF Graduate Research Fellowships

Two Hamilton seniors, Phillip Milner and Tom Morrell (photo), have been awarded National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships. Milner is a chemistry/math double major who will be starting a Ph.D. program in chemistry in the fall, at an institution yet to be determined. Morrell is a chemistry major who will begin a Ph.D. program in chemistry at Princeton in the fall.

Two recent Hamilton graduates, Louisa Brown ’09 and Leanne Pasquini ’07, also received the prestigious fellowships. Brown is in her first year in the Ph.D. program in chemistry at Cornell, and Pasquini is at Yale in the first year of an environmental engineering Ph.D. program. Gregory Hartt ’08, Marco Allodi ’08 and Kristen Alongi ’08 received honorable mention.

The NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) helps ensure the vitality of the human resource base of science and engineering in the United States and reinforces its diversity. The program recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in NSF-supported science, technology, engineering and mathematics disciplines who are pursuing research-based master’s and doctoral degrees in the U.S. and abroad.
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Ian Rosenstein, associate professor of chemistry, commented “This is a highly prestigious award and Phill and Tom are the first Hamilton students that I know of in recent years to be awarded one while still a college senior.”

Phillip Milner was a recipient of the Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship for the 2009-10 academic year. The Goldwater is the premier national undergraduate award in the fields of mathematics, the natural sciences and engineering. He was also the recipient of a Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Talent Expansion Program (STEP) /Dreyfus Grant prior to his freshman year at Hamilton, which enabled him to conduct summer research with a Hamilton science faculty member.

Tom Morrell recently published an article, “Atmospheric Implications for Formation of Clusters of Ammonium and 1−10 Water Molecules,” in the Journal of Physical Chemistry A. His co-author was George Shields, former Hamilton College chemistry professor and currently dean of the College of Science & Technology at Armstrong Atlantic State University. Morrell was also the recipient of a STEP/Dreyfus grant.

NSF Fellows are anticipated to become knowledge experts who can contribute significantly to research, teaching and innovations in science and engineering. These individuals are crucial to maintaining and advancing the nation’s technological infrastructure and national security as well as contributing to the economic well-being of society at large.

Related: Three Iowa State Students Honored with NSF GRFP Awards – 2009 NSF GRFP Fellow: Sarah Latshaw – 2008 NSF Fellow: Ekaterina Hristova Spriggs

Notifications have recently been sent out for numerous scholarships and fellowships supported by the American Society for Engineering Education. Please visit the respected programs’ individual websites for more information.

The NASA Aeronautics Scholarship Program, which invests in the educational development of the aeronautics workforce by providing opportunities to attract undergraduate and graduate students to the aeronautics and related fields, sent out notifications late last week.

The Science, Mathematics and Research for Transformation Scholarship, which also let applicants know their status late last week, is a scholarship for service program which gives awardees a fully scholarship for undergraduate and graduate students pursuing degrees in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines.

Notifications of awardees were sent out early this week for the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship Program. This fellowship supports graduate students who are pursuing research-based master’s and doctoral degrees in NSF-supported science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines.

Congratulations to all applicants and awardees for all your hard work!

“I like to think of myself as a Math Geek interested in words and a Word Nerd interested in math,” Sarah Tyler, NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Awardee, has said about herself. Growing up, having to overcome struggles with dyslexia, she was put into remedial classes for some subjects, only to prove herself extraordinary in others.

Tyler received her Bachelors of Science Degree in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University in 2004. Currently attending the University of California, Santa Cruz, Tyler is enrolled in the School of Engineering, pursuing a Doctor of Philosophy Degree in Computer Science. Her focus of study is Personalized Search, as it relates to Recommendation Systems, Sponsored Search, and Social Networks. Other areas of interest include Knowledge Representation, Statistical and Machine Learning, and Information Extraction.

Photo courtesy of Sarah Tyler

Before graduate school, Tyler worked for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory where she worked with Information Retrieval and Natural Language Processing, as well as co-founded and led the Text Research Reading Group, a group seeking to stay side by side with language technology’s latest research. In her graduate career to date, she has interned for Microsoft Research and NEC Labs America.

Tyler says, “Most notably, I wrote a Writing Sample Analyzer, which predicts reading ease based on Flesch, Fog, and Flesch-Kincaid approximations.”

Sarah Tyler has been honored with numerous fellowships and awards beside the NSF GRFP. These include a Cota Robles Fellowship, awards from the Computing Research Association, as well as various awards from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Carnegie Mellon University.

The National Academies Research Council in conjunction with federal laboratories is conducting the Research Associateship Program. The Research Associateship Program attracts outstanding scientists and engineers, at the postdoctoral and senior levels for posts as guest lecturers at participating laboratories. A limited number of opportunities are available for graduate students in select fields.

The Research Associateship Program encourages engineering and scientific professionals opportunities to further their research by working in laboratories where they can conduct their own independent research while contributing to the overall vision of the laboratories.

Eligibility and Application: Applicants must have earned a Ph.D., Sc.D., M.D., D.V.M., or academically equivalent research doctorate before beginning tenure. If you have not received the degree, the graduate dean, registrar, or recorder (not the department chairman or major professor) must certify in writing–directly to the Associateship Programs Office–that you have met all requirements for the degree.

Application deadline is May 1, 2010.

“Participating laboratories receive a stimulus to their programs by the presence of bright, highly motivated, recent doctoral graduates and by senior investigators with established records of research productivity. New ideas, techniques, and approaches to problems contribute to the overall research climate of the laboratories. Indirectly, Associateships also make available to the broader scientific and engineering communities the excellent and often unique research facilities that exist in the sponsoring laboratories”.

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The Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship Program has announced its fellowship program for outstanding students pursuing research based Ph.D. degrees in the scientific and engineering fields with a emphasis on the computational sciences.

The $32,000 yearly stipend funded by the DOE’s Office of Science and National Nuclear Security Administration provides support for students in their first or second year of graduate study in the physical, engineering, computer, mathematical, or life sciences.

“The fellowship provides support and guidance to some of the nation’s best scientific graduate students, and these graduates now work in DOE laboratories, private industry and educational institutions. Over 250 students at more than 50 U.S. universities have trained as Fellows, and the demand is only growing”.

For further information, please see the Fellowship Eligibility and Requirements section of the program announcement.

The National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering in an effort to increase engineering and scientific talent among underrepresented minority students in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematical fields (STEM) has implemented several fellowship opportunities for university students. NACME’s commitment to implementing effective programs to increase the recruitment, retention, and graduation of under-represented students in the Engineering fields has partnered with several leading corporations and foundations to provide scholarship opportunities. Application and Eligibility requirements are provided with an extensive list of several fellowship and scholarship opportunities.

NACME FELLOWSHIPS

“The NACME Fellows program was created to provide an opportunity for individuals and companies interested in establishing a named scholarship program in support of NACME’s mission to increase the representation of underrepresented (URM) minorities in engineering.”

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The 2010 SMART Scholarship application will be closing on December 15, 2009 at 5pm EST.

SMART has been established by the Department of Defense (DoD) to support undergraduate and graduate students pursuing degrees in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines. The program aims to increase the number of civilian scientists and engineers working at DoD laboratories.

Eligibility requirements for applicants include:
*Must be a U.S. citizen and at least 18 years of age or older as of August 1, 2010.
*Able to participate in summer internships at DoD laboratories
*Willing to accept post-graduate employment with the DoD
*Must be in good standing with a minimum cumulative GPA of 3.0 on a 4.0 scale (as calculated by the SMART application)
*Pursuing an undergraduate or graduate degree in one of the disciplines listed on the About SMART page