Denison Graduate Fellowship

Award Description:

The Denison Graduate Fellowship is used to recruit and support new graduate students in basic and applied research in the integrative plant sciences. Primary consideration should be to recruit new graduate students of high merit and with the greatest potential for scholarly excellence and the greatest potential to make lifelong contributions to either research, teaching, and/or extension in integrative plant science.

Criteria:

The Denison Graduate Fellowship will be awarded to one incoming student (M.S., M.S./Ph.D., or Ph.D.) each year. The Fellowship will recognize outstanding merit and is designed to help recruit our most competitive applicants who have the greatest potential to promote excellence in research, teaching, and/or extension in the plant sciences, defined broadly.

The Fellowship will provide one year of full (12 month) funding as determined by the Graduate School (Tuition, Health Insurance, and Stipend for Academic and Summer Terms) and must come with a guarantee of additional funding (at least one additional year of funding for M.S. or at least two additional years of support for M.S./Ph.D. or Ph.D.).

Directors of Graduate Studies in the School of Integrative Plant Science (Horticulture, Plant Biology, Plant Breeding, Plant Pathology and Plant-Microbe Biology, and Soil and Crop Sciences) will each nominate one highly meritorious applicant each year. Nominations will be considered by the SIPS Graduate Fellowship Committee (SIPS-GFC) or by the SIPS Executive Committee until such a time that the SIPS-GFC is established. It is anticipated that funding will be used equitably over time to support applicants to all SIPS graduate Fields. The committee will rank the nominees so that the award can be distributed to an alternate applicant if required (as described below).

In the event that the awardee receives an additional Fellowship award the Denison Graduate Fellowship should be used to provide multiple years of funding for the applicant; so long as the multiple Fellowship funding sources can be dispersed appropriately over multiple years.

In the event that the Fellowship nominee does not elect to attend Cornell, or if the nominee is unable to receive the Fellowship for any other reason, the Fellowship will be offered to the second ranked applicant and so forth until the Fellowship has been distributed.

Nominations:

The following four items and candidate application materials should be submitted:

• Letter of recommendation from the DGS describing the applicant’s merit, the recruiting plan, the plan for funding the applicant, and the most likely Major Adviser for the applicant.
• A copy of the applicants graduate application file to include: transcripts, letters of recommendation, test scores, and other relevant materials.

Submission of nomination materials

DGS should submit the nominations either to the Chair of the SIPS-GFC or to the Director of SIPS until such a time that the SIPS-GFC is established by February 28 of each year. The SIPS-GFC or by the SIPS Executive Committee will decide the recipient of the Denison Fellowship from among the submitted nominees and notify the all DGS no later than March 15 of each year.