EPS graduate and undergraduate students receive highly competitive fellowships from the National Science Foundation, NASA, and Consortium for Ocean Leadership

April 15, 2010

EPS graduate and undergreaduate students were successful this spring in winning highly competitive fellowships to support their Ph.D. research.
 
Dustin Winslow received a NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. These fellowships provide 3 years of support for graduate study leading to a research-based M.S. or Ph.D. degree, and are intended for students who are in the early stages of their graduate studies. Dustin's graduate work is being supervised by Andy Fisher. The goal of his research is to characterize hydrothermal circulation in oceanic crust. This work is done through the creation of numerical flow models based on observations made in scientific ocean drilling efforts in a variety of settings.

Alicia Muirhead, a senior in the Standard Earth Sciences B.S. major, received a NSF Graduate Research Fellowship to support her graduate work at the University of Colorado, Boulder. At UC Boulder, Alicia's research will be supervised by Shijie Zhong. She will be studying the interior of the Moon using deep moonquakes from the Apollo seismic network, solid tides, and lunar mantle dynamics. She will explore how the lunar interior behaves in three dimensions in reaction to tidal stresses, and how the asymmetric distribution of deep moonquakes, the global asymmetry of mare basalt volcanism and mantle composition are related.

Ken Mankoff received an award from the NASA Earth and Space Science Fellowship Program. This 3-year predoctoral fellowship seeks to ensure continued training of a highly qualified workforce in disciplines required to achieve NASA’s scientific goals. Ken's graduate work is being supervised by Slawek Tulaczyk and Sharon Stammerjohn. His work focuses on ice and ocean interactions nearby and underneath ice shelves using observational fieldwork, remote sensing, and modeling.

Kelsey Dyck received a Schlanger Fellowship from the Consortium for Ocean Leadership. This fellowship carries a one-year scholarship of $28,000 that is awarded based on the strength of a research proposal that involves ocean drilling. Kelsey's graduate work is being supervised by Christina Ravelo and Paul Koch. His work involves measuring past sea-surface temperatures in order to better constrain oceanic and atmospheric circulation changes in the tropical Pacific over multiple iterations of the glacial-interglacial cycle. At the conclusion of the fellowship, he will travel to Washington, DC, to share the results of this research with the US Science Support Program.