Amanda PentecostB.S./Ph.D. student Amanda Pentecost (advisor: Yury Gogotsi) and Ph.D. student Derrick Smith (advisor: Christopher Li) are both recipients of the 2013 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (NSF GRFP). The fellowship provides funding for three years of graduate stipend and tuition support, as well as opportunities to conduct research internationally.
Amanda’s current research is a collaborative project with the Shanghai Advanced Research Institute's Nanomedicine and Translational Medicine Center, located in Shanghai, China. She is working to create a drug delivery system with a carbon nanoparticle platform in order to deliver chemotherapeutic drugs to brain tumors.
Derrick SmithDerrick’s current research involves investigating nano-confinement behaviors of ion transport in polymer systems for polymer battery membrane applications using holographic lithography. The strength of his research in this area has led to his first publication, “Tuning Ion Conducting Pathways Using Holographic Polymerization,” in Nano Letters 2012 12;1.
Nationwide, 36 fellowships were awarded to students in Materials Science and Engineering Departments. Of these, only seven departments, including Drexel Materials, received two or more NSF GRFP awards this year.
With these two awards, a total of ten students from Drexel’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering have received the fellowship. Past recipients include Ph.D. student Kristy Jost (advisor: Yury Gogotsi), B.S. student Prineha Narang (advisor: Yury Gogotsi), B.S./M.S. student Holly McIlwee (advisor, Caroline Schauer), M.S. student Alex Moseson (advisor: Michel Barsoum), and Ph.D. students Stephen Niezgoda (advisor: Surya Kalidindi), Kris Behler (advisor: Yury Gogotsi), María Pía Rossi (advisor: Yury Gogotsi), and John Chmiola (advisor: Yury Gogotsi).