Lofty Ambitions
Three graduate students are awarded prestigious NASA Earth and Space Science Fellowships
By Julie Cohen
While NASA’s mandate is space exploration, the nearly 60-year-old government agency also supplies an immense amount of scientific data about Earth from the organization’s satellites and other aeronautic missions.
NASA requires a highly trained workforce to achieve its scientific goals. One means of finding those skilled scientists is by way of its Earth and Space Science Fellowship program, which provides training grants to principal investigators at universities and educational institutions that support graduate student research.
Three students from UC Santa Barbara have received NASA funding for earth science projects. Deanna Nash, David Miller and Michael Nowicki are among only 54 people out of 424 applicants who were so honored.
“It’s a very competitive fellowship,” said geography professor Leila Carvalho, who mentors Nash. “The fact that three UCSB students received this fellowship in one year — for terrestrial, atmospheric and oceanography studies — speaks to the breadth of the research done in our department.”
