Ernestine Fu
ERNESTINE FU, a PhD student in civil and environmental engineering, and MARTIN FISCHER, professor of civil and environmental engineering, have been chosen to receive one of the first Schmidt-MacArthur Fellowships.
The fellowship is an international postgraduate fellowship on the circular economy for design, engineering and business students.
Funded by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation and the Schmidt Family Foundation, the fellowships are designed to challenge postgraduate students and their academic mentors to innovate for a circular economy.
Each student receives a fellowship to help him or her undertake a circular economy innovation project with access to an online learning platform, mentoring support from his or her university and an invitation to a week-long intensive summer school in London in June. Fellowship recipients will share their learning experiences and developing projects on the MacArthur Foundation website.
On the foundation website, Fu explains, “I am a student at Stanford University pursuing a PhD in Civil and Environmental Engineering. I recently completed my undergraduate and master’s studies in the fields of energy strategy, management science and engineering. With the support of the Schmidt-MacArthur Fellowship, I am excited to create a class focused on circular economy at Stanford, to be taught this upcoming academic year with Professor Martin Fischer.”
Fu has been widely profiled in the media for her work as an entrepreneur, including in Forbes and the Silicon Valley Business Journal.
According to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation website, the “circular economy is a generic term for an industrial economy that is, by design or intention, restorative and in which materials flows are of two types, biological nutrients, designed to reenter the biosphere safely, and technical nutrients, which are designed to circulate at high quality without entering the biosphere.”
