VCU news

By Patrick Kane

Two Virginia Commonwealth University School of Engineering students have received prestigious fellowships from the National Science Foundation.

Nicolas Miguel Andrade and Patrick Link will receive three-year, $34,000 annual stipends and $12,000 education allowances, along with international research and professional development opportunities.

This program is the most prestigious award for graduate students that the NSF supports.

“This program is the most prestigious award for graduate students that the NSF supports,” said Gregory Triplett, Ph.D., associate dean of graduate studies at the School of Engineering. “We are hopeful that we will have many more success stories. Faculty, staff and administration share in the success of these students.”

The NSF’s Graduate Research Fellowship Program is the oldest graduate fellowship of its kind, founded in 1951. It has supported more than 50,000 fellowships aimed at students pursuing research-based master’s and doctoral degrees in the sciences.

As a high school student drawn to research, Andrade connected with Ümit Özgür, Ph.D., associate professor of electrical engineering.

“I went to Maggie L. Walker Governor’s School, and we had a mentorship program. We were able to go out in the community and pick anyone we wanted to work with,” Andrade said. That early bond led to years of experiments in Özgür’s lab working with light-emitting diodes and vertical cavity lasers.

Andrade, a member of the Honors College, will graduate in May and continue his education in a joint master’s-Ph.D. program at the University of California, Berkeley, where he hopes to study high-efficiency transistors and light-switching technologies. He is also earning a degree in physics from the College of Humanities and Sciences.

Andrade is a 2014 recipient of the Goldwater Scholarship, applying for both opportunities with support from VCU’s National Scholarship Office, which is available to assist students from all schools and majors.

Link credits his wife, his son and his mentor, Rebecca Heise, Ph.D., assistant professor of biomedical engineering, for his success in the lab.

“I really had a strong connection with her when I first came up and visited, and that's been absolutely the key to everything,” he said.

In VCU’s biomedical engineering doctoral program, Link is focused on nanoparticle research, breaking down and rebuilding proteins into forms that could carry future medications.

“I think biomedical engineering really takes key components from all other sorts of biology, and takes a different approach to it,” he said.

The grant will allow Link to focus on research in the coming years.

A native of Reno, Nevada, and a 2011 graduate of Western Carolina University, Link served six-and-a-half years in North Carolina and Okinawa, Japan, as an Army Special Forces medic.

Triplett said VCU’s focus on undergraduate research opportunities bolsters students applying for national awards and funding.

“This is a really good time for VCU. The two winners this year are an indication of greater things to come,” he said. “They are doing research that matters.”