Space Dynamics Lab offers fellowships for future
Utah State University’s Space Dynamics Laboratory (SDL) hopes to receive a big return on a small investment by enticing the top doctoral students in the country to do research in the lab while pursuing their degree.
SDL is offering a fellowship with a $30,000 annual stipend to students in mechanical and aerospace engineering, electrical and computer engineering, and physics. One “Tomorrow PhD Fellowship,” which can be renewed for up to three years, will be offered to a student in each of these areas.
Two USU graduate students, Daniel Stormont and Nick Alley, were the first to be awarded the fellowship.
SDL is a not-for-profit research corporation wholly owned by USU through its Research Foundation.
Steve Hansen, deputy director of SDL, said the lab has selfish reasons for offering the fellowships.
“If you invest $100,000 in someone, that’s eventually going to bring in $10 or $20 million to your laboratory or the university through work that they do or research that they’ve done. It’s a pretty cheap investment,” Hansen said. “We can’t do our work unless we are right on the cutting edge of technology, and the only way to stay on the cutting edge of technology is to invest in education.”
Hansen said the $30,000 stipend is substantially more than stipends offered by most universities to attract doctoral candidates.
“These fellowships are among the very best in the country in terms of dollar value. The idea is by offering fellowships of this magnitude and by advertising nationally, we’re going to get some of the very best students in the country to come to Utah State,” he said.
The fellowships are also a recruiting tool to attract employees to the laboratory, Hansen said.
“We hope that some of the people who get these PhDs will come and work for the Space Dynamics Laboratory,” he said.
Even if the recipients of the fellowship eventually go to work somewhere else, Hansen said, the work they do enhances USU’s reputation.
“There is a value in simply getting our name out there,” he said.
While the fellowships are offered to any U.S. citizen and will be advertised nationwide to attract students from all over the country, the first two fellowships were awarded to outstanding USU students “in order to kick start” the program, Hansen said.
Alley, a mechanical and aerospace engineer, received one of the first fellowships. Alley’s research involves designing unmanned aerial vehicles.
“My emphasis will probably be designing a plane that can take off and fly quickly to a location and then loiter in one location at very low speeds for a very long time,” he said.
Alley said his research has applications ranging from homeland security to fire fighting.
Using SDL sensors, the unmanned planes could look for radioactive material being brought into the country or for forest fires or illegal immigrants, among other things.
“You basically could send up 20 little planes that fly themselves, and they can fly 24 hours a day up and down the border or go and check out ships that come into a port. In the long run, it actually becomes cheaper and more effective than having humans patrol the border or look for fires,” he said.
SDL is one of the world’s leaders in sensor design, Alley said.
“Not many companies can touch what they’ve been able to do with the sensors that they send up into space,” he said.
More information on the fellowships and the Space Dynamics Laboratory can be found at www.sdl.usu.edu/employment/fellowships.
–royburton@cc.usu.edu