Graduate students Jacqueline Kenney and Benjamin Ransford have received 2009 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships, and Henry Feild received Honorable Mention in the competition. The Graduate Research Fellowship provides three years of support for graduate study leading to research-based master's or doctoral degrees and is intended for students who are in the early stages of their graduate study. The competitive Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) invests in graduate education for a cadre of diverse individuals who demonstrate their potential to successfully complete graduate degree programs in disciplines relevant to the mission of the National Science Foundation.
In another recent award, Robotics Lab graduate student Scott Kuindersma has been awarded a prestigious NASA Graduate Student Research Program Fellowship for his proposal entitled, "Dexterous Mobility and Manipulation." With this Fellowship, he will receive funding for up to three years while pursuing his Ph.D.
Also, graduate students Greg Druck and Henry Feild are recipients of 2009-2010 Yahoo! Key Scientific Challenges (KSC) Program Awards. Druck and Feild are two of twenty students honored nationwide with this competitive award created to support a limited number of outstanding PhD students who Yahoo! believes are doing research in very important and challenging areas.
Bo An was chosen for a University Fellowship for 2009-10, one of ten graduate students chosen from the campus.
Computer Science graduate student Marwan (Moe) Mattar was named as one of the seven 2009-10 Isenberg Scholars. In 1994, Mr. Eugene M. Isenberg, alumnus of the School of Management at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and CEO of Nabors Industries, Inc., established these prestigious awards to aid graduate students who demonstrate academic merit and a commitment to the integration of science, engineering and management.
Incoming graduate student Hee-Tae Jung received this year's Robin Popplestone Fellowship in Robotics & Artificial Intelligence. Jung received his M.S. at Stanford University and his B.S. at Yonsei University in Korea.