Director of Defense Research and Engineering Anita Jones
today announced plans to make 353 awards to 112 academic
institutions to support graduate student training in science and
engineering fields important to national defense. Subject to the
successful completion of negotiations between the Department of
Defense and the academic institutions, the awards will provide
three years of support to 401 students pursuing advanced degrees.
Awards are expected to average $135,000 for the three years of
support.
The awards are being made under the Augmentation Awards for
Science and Engineering Research Training (AASERT) program. The
AASERT awards are made to professors who perform research under
DoD contracts or grants, and who compete for additional AASERT
funding. AASERT awards enable each professor to award graduate
research traineeships to one or two U.S. citizens. Each
traineeship supports tuition, living expenses, and research
expenses (materials, shop services, computer time, etc.)
connected with the graduate student's thesis research.
In addition to supporting graduate students, the AASERT
awards will involve more than 100 undergraduate students in
DoD-sponsored university research. That involvement is designed
to stimulate interest in advanced science or engineering studies.
Today's announcement is the result of the Fiscal Year 1997
merit competition for AASERT funding conducted by the Army
Research Office, Office of Naval Research, Air Force Office of
Scientific Research, and Science and Technology Directorate of
the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization. Those DoD research
offices solicited AASERT proposals from university researchers
currently performing DoD research, and invited researchers
without current DoD support to submit proposals for both DoD
research funding and AASERT augmentation. The research offices
received more than 1,000 proposals requesting nearly $200 million
in support for research training. A list of the winning
proposers is attached.
