Schmidt Science Fellows Program Nominations Due

The Graduate College invites nominations for a new and exciting postdoctoral fellowship program.  The Schmidt Family Foundation, founded by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and his wife Wendy Schmidt, has recently launched the Schmidt Science Fellows Program.  The program offers an innovative 11-month postdoctoral experience to students from the natural sciences, engineering, mathematics, and computing-oriented disciplines.  Targeting students who are near completion of their PhDs, the program offers training in fields outside of the student’s current area of expertise.  The goal is to introduce Fellows to the ideas, practices, methods, and cultures of other scientific disciplines, thereby exposing Fellows to new topics, new ways of thinking, and new people who can help guide Fellows toward new paths to success.     

Please find complete details on the program on the Schmidt Science Fellows homepage.       

Only students who expect to complete their PhDs by July 2018 (but no earlier than May 2017) are eligible.  The fellowship offers a $100,000 stipend, and it provides courses and research experiences at some of the world’s leading academic institutions along with hands-on work in field-leading laboratories.    

The Schmidt Family Foundation has invited only select universities to participate in the fellowship program, and the University of Illinois is one of those universities.  We are allowed to submit five representatives for consideration in the national competition, and the Graduate College will coordinate the campus competition to select those five representatives.  

The campus competition will operate via departmental nomination, and eligible departments may submit up to three nominations each.  The deadline to submit nominations to the department grad office is Oct. 30, 2017, so we have time to submit nominations to the campus by the final Nov. 2 deadline.  You can find details on the nomination submission process in the Schmidt Science Fellows Program listing in our Fellowship Finder database.