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The Stanford Graduate Fellowships Program in Science and Engineering first awarded fellowships in 1997. The program was initiated by Gerhard Casper, then President of Stanford University, and is designed to support the University's commitment to attract the very best graduate students and to reduce its dependence on federal funding for Ph.D. training. The fellowships are available in the natural sciences, mathematics, statistics, engineering, the basic sciences in the School of Medicine, and those social sciences, including education, which are now dependent on federal assistantship support for their doctoral students.

Over the years, over 900 Stanford Graduate Fellows students have conferred their PhD at Stanford University.

SGF recipient RHIJU DAS used a video game to unlock the mysteries of RNA and went on to join the Stanford faculty. This video celebrates the 15th anniversary of the SGF program and the generous donors who made it a reality.

SGFs in the News

• Kirsten Frieda, 2006 Gabilan Fellow, worked with Professor Steven Block using optical tweezers to watch the folding of a single RNA molecule in real-time. Their use of microscopic beads as a read-out of RNA folding is unprecedented and has important implications in understanding gene regulation. Their technique has been published in the journal Science.
• Johanna Nelson, postdoctoral scholar at SLAC, has been using high-power X-ray imaging to study lithium-sulfur batteries to hopefully develop viable lithium-sulfur batteries for electric cars. The co-lead authors of the study are SLAC postdoctoral researcher Sumohan Misra and Stanford doctoral student Yuan Yang, a  2009 ABB SGF fellow. The study is also co-authored by Hailiang Wang, a 2009 Henry Fan Fellow.
  
• H. Christina Fan, a 2005 Hong Kong Alumni Fellow, was co-first author of an article under Stephen Quake, the Lee Otterson Professor in the School of Engineering and professor of bioengineering and of applied physics, on the sequencing of fetal genomes. This method requires blood samples from only the mother- not the father or fetus, and so can diagnose genetic abnormalities without harm to the fetus.  She was recently named one of 2012's top 35 innovators under 35. 
• Mark Churchland, now a professor at Columbia, and John Cunningham, a 2004 Professor Michael J. Flynn Fellow, now a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, have shown that the brain activity controlling arm movement does not encode external spatial information – such as direction, distance, and speed – but is instead rhythmic in nature. Justin Foster, 2007 Texas Instruments SGF, was also an author of the paper.
• Hailiang Wang, a 2009 Henry Fan Fellow, is a co-author of a study on the potential of carbon nanotubules to energize fuel cells and metal-air batteries. Platinum catalysts, which are currently used to energize fuel cells, are very expensive, and this alternative could lower the cost of fuel cell electricity production. This discovery may play an important role in many fields, including the development fuel cell cars.

• Hillary Young, a 2005 Gabilan Stanford Graduate Fellow (PhD '10 in Biology and now a Post-Doc in the Dirzo lab), was part of a team of Stanford researchers that recently discovered one of the longest ecological interaction chains.  Their findings published in Scientific Reports elucidate the detrimental influence of human disturbance on ecosystems across surprising boundaries.  

• Daniel Pivonka, 2007 Burt and Deedee McMurtry Fellow, is part of a lab headed by Professor Ada Poon that has developed a self-propelled device capable of moving through the bloodstream. The wirelessly powered chip has the potential to deliver drugs, clear blood clots, and perform diagnostics.
• David Stavens, 2005 David Cheriton Stanford Graduate Fellow, is the CEO and co-founder of Know Labs.  Know Labs offers free and high-caliber college courses through the online education threshold, Udacity.  Know Labs just completed a very successful first round of courses and is optimistic about the future of cheap, online learning. 
• Michael Massey, 2009 Robert and Marvel Kirby SGF, participated in research led by Stanford geochemist Kate Maher on the possibility of using the precious gemstone opal to clean up areas with uranium contamination, a cost-effective solution to a very serious problem.
• Gary Shambat (Electrical Engineering), a 2008 Sequoia Capital Fellow, is part of a team of electrical engineers headed by associate professor Jelena Vuckovic that have developed a new nanoscale device that transmits data at ultrafast rates while using thousands of times less energy than current technologies. The nanophotonics device is a major step forward for on-chip data transmission.
• Electrical Engineering students, Tomer London, 2010 Robert Bosch Fellow and Asaf Cidon, 2010 Leonard Shustek Fellow, published a paper introducing Multi-threaded Dynamic Remote Execution, a technique that enables mobile devices operating systems to decide in real-time which parts of the code to execute locally, and which part to offload to a remote server, in order to both increase computing performance and reduce energy consumption. The paper shows that this technique improves performance by over 50% while reducing energy consumption by 33%.
  

• Yu Lin, a 2008 Larry Young SGF fellow, is the lead author on a paper about the creation of an amorphous form of diamond which becomes stronger as pressure increases, and has more uniform strength than true diamond.

• Dr. Omkar Deshpande, a 2002 David Cheriton Fellow, co-authored a paper that demonstrated the ability of societies with highly stratified class structures to perpetuate themselves on the basis of their instability and high rates of migration.

• Laurie Burns, a 2006 Gabilan Fellow in Applied Physics, co-authored the Nature Methods paper describing a fngertip-size microscope which can be used in the lab or in the field and has the potential for studying the brain and its diseases.
• Sara Brownell, a 2007 Smith Fellow in the Biology department, co-authored a study showing that students taking authentic research classes rather than "cookbook-style" lab classes were more confident performing lab tasks and more enthusiastic about pursuing research.
• Yuan Yang, a 2009 ABB fellow, partnered with associate professor Yi Cui to develop and author a paper on transparent lithium-ion batteries.
• Yi-Wei Chen, a 2008 Benchmark Fellow, is a lead doctoral student under Paul McIntyre and Christopher Chidsey and made a key discovery that lead to their successful development of an improved water-splitter.
• Ramsharan Rangarajan,  a 2006 William R. and Sarah Hart Kimball Fellow, and Anca Vacarescu, a 2006 Office of Technology Licensing Fellow, were awarded with the Centennial Teaching Assistant Award for their outstanding work as teaching assistants.

• Annemarie Baltay (Geophysics), a 2005 Gabilan Fellow, coauthored a Science Express paper exploring the unusual earthquake that gave the Japan 3/11 tsunami extra power.

  For more articles, go to https://sgf.stanford.edu/news.html.

Especially for Fellows

• The annual SGF stipend for 2011-12 is $34,200 ($8,550 per quarter) and will increase to an annual amount of $35,360 (8,840 per quarter) for 2012-13.
• 2011 Stanford Graduate Fellowship Recipients
• SGF Welcome Dinner for 2012 recipients will be in November 2012, date to be decided.