KU News Release

Engineering graduate student receives $30,000 SMART Defense fellowship

LAWRENCE — A University of Kansas doctoral student in electrical engineering is one of 32 students nationwide to receive the 2006 Science, Mathematics And Research for Transformation Defense Fellowship.

Jamie Jenshak of Iron Mountain, Mich., will receive a stipend worth at least $30,000 per year to include full tuition and fees, book allowance and government health benefits as part of this Department of Defense program. As a condition of the fellowship, Jenshak must fulfill an employment obligation with a Department of Defense agency. He earned his undergraduate degree from Bradley University and a master’s degree from the University of Missouri-Rolla.

More than 300 undergraduate and graduate students applied for the fellowships. Jenshak and two Texas A&M University students were the Big 12 Conference recipients.

James Stiles, KU professor of electrical engineering and computer science, encouraged Jenshak to apply for the fellowship.

“Jamie is a very mature and focused young scholar,” Stiles said. “He came to KU because he had a specific interest in electromagnetic sensing and radar signal processing. The level of mathematics associated with this discipline can be intimidating to some graduate students, but Jamie’s attraction to these topics is in part because of their mathematical complexity.”

First awarded in 2005, the SMART scholarship/fellowship program is designed to promote the education, recruitment and retention of students in science, math and engineering studies.

On behalf of the Department of Defense, the program is administered by the American Society for Engineering Education and managed by the Naval Postgraduate School. For more information about the SMART program, go to www.asee.org/smart or www.nps.edu.

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