Biology
Mathematics
College of Arts and Sciences
Engineering
Psychology
Awards and Rankings
Alumni
International Languages and Cultures
Undergraduate Scholarly Engagement
Chemistry
June 19, 2018
Four University of Portland alumni have been awarded prestigious Graduate Research Fellowships from the National Science Foundation. It is the largest number of UP graduates to earn the fellowships in the same year. The winners are:
NSF fellows benefit from a three-year annual stipend of $34,000, along with a $12,000 cost of education allowance for tuition and fees (paid to the institution), opportunities for international research and professional development, and the freedom to conduct their own research in their respective graduate programs.
“The NSF Fellowship program is one of the most prestigious in the nation for graduate STEM students,” according to Heather Dillon, engineering, who conducted research with Katherine Cummins. This year only 2,000 students were selected from over 12,000 applications.
“For a school our size to have four alumni recipients in one year speaks volumes about the type of preparation they received in their undergraduate careers,” says John Orr, assistant provost and director of the Office of Undergraduate Scholarly Engagement at UP. All four alumni had experience conducting research on campus with UP faculty members, and two conducted summer research at other universities. The opportunity to conduct collaborative research with faculty members across the curriculum is a strength of the University of Portland, points out Orr, “since we have so few graduate programs—when faculty members want to collaborate with students, they bring in undergraduates. By the time they graduate many of them have decided that graduate school and increased research are in their future.”
According to Dillon, “Katie worked with me on a complex project tied to computational fluids modeling. Her undergraduate research project would have been extremely challenging for most graduate students, but Katie dove into the project with ease. She not only learned a new software tool, but she then read the appropriate research papers and set up the computational framework for the system on her own.”
Shannon Danforth completed her master’s degree in her first year at University of Michigan and is now in their Ph.D. program. “I spend my time analyzing data from human motion experiments and discussing the math behind new methods of analysis,” she says. “My research is useful in assessing the performance of prosthetic devices and robotic exoskeletons as well as mitigating injury in at-risk populations, such as older adults or athletes. After graduation, I hope to gain more research experience by working in a lab and applying for a university faculty position.”
For more information, contact the Office of Undergraduate Scholarly Engagement at 503.943. 8264 or leasor@up.edu.
University of Portland
5000 N. Willamette Blvd.,
Portland, Oregon 97203-5798
503.943.8000
This website uses cookies to track information for analytics purposes. You can view the full University of Portland privacy policy for more information.
