Congratulations to Areidy Beltran, a doctoral student in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management (ESPM), on receiving two prestigious national fellowships: the Ford Foundation Fellowship and the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Office of Science Graduate Student Research (SCGSR) fellowship.
The 2021 Ford Foundation Fellowship competition is administered by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine's Fellowships Office. The programs seek to increase the diversity of the nation's college and university faculties by increasing their ethnic and racial diversity, to maximize the educational benefits of diversity, and to increase the number of professors who can and will use diversity as a resource for enriching the education of all students.
Through world-class training and access to state-of-the-art facilities and resources at DOE National Laboratories, the SCGSR fellowship prepares graduate students to enter jobs of critical importance to DOE's mission. Awardees were selected based on merit peer review by scientific experts, and their dissertation research is evaluated on how it addresses societal challenges at national and international scales. Projects span such fields as earth systems modeling, environmental system science, nuclear physics, microelectronics, machine learning, and data science.
Beltran's research at the College focuses on the food-energy-water-climate nexus. She investigates where water availability may lead to water, food, or energy insecurity around the world, based on population growth and climate change scenarios.
This month, a DailyCal article featured Beltran and discussed her awards. Read more about the awards at the Ford Foundation website and the DOE Office of Science website.