Achievement

Ebonee Walker, a 1st year Vanderbilt IGERT who matriculated from the Fisk Masters Program, was a 2009 recipient of a 2-year DoD SMART Fellowship. This fellowship will supply the financial support for the remainder of her Ph.D. program. Ebonee is an excellent example of a student who completed her M.A. at Fisk, and has succeeded in the Vanderbilt IGPMS Ph.D. program owing to additional tutoring. After seeing that some of the Fisk students struggled to pass the Vanderbilt Ph.D. core curriculum, we have employed tutors to supplement their background when required. In Ebonee’s case, she was tutored in both the solid state physics and materials chemistry core courses. She has passed the pre-qualifying exam for acceptance in the Ph.D. program, and will take the final qualifying exam for Ph.D. candidacy when she presents her research proposal to investigate both experimentally and theoretically the influence of functionalization on the thermal conductivity of carbon nanotubes.