Aug. 16 kicks off Innovators Week for 68 undergrad students who are recipients of scholarships from the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation (ASF), an Orlando-based nonprofit that distributed over $1 million this year.
The four-day event will be held at the Hilton Orlando on Destination Parkway, and all the scholarship recipients will be there, as the foundation covered their travel. Also, professional development seminars will feature accomplished luminaries such as retired NASA astronaut Eileen Collins.
Why it matters: Scholarship for students in STEM disciplines can nurture highly skilled leaders in technology fields here in the region.
Among the attendees is Erick Rocher, a scholarship recipient who grew up in Orlando and graduated from Freedom High School before embarking upon his college studies at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
“I'm looking forward to meeting all of the other scholars from the other schools around the country,” he said. “They have very diverse areas of research. I always think about my peers that I might one day be networking with when I want to build a team.”
Rocher is set on earning an M.D.-Ph.D., with the Ph.D. in biomedical engineering so he can help design new immunotherapies with gene delivery. If that sounds ambitious, consider that he’s in equal company when assembled this week with the other scholars.
ASF’s Astronaut Scholarship is offered to junior and senior-year college students pursuing degrees in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). The process begins with nominations from professors or faculty members at an ASF-partnering university such as the University of Central Florida or Florida Institute of Technology.
Scholarship recipients typically go on to make significant contributions to their chosen fields, and some of them land in Central Florida.
For example, Travis Terry, who received an ASF scholarship in 1995 when he was a student at UCF, went on to become principal software engineer at iHeart Radio Media based in Satellite Beach.
Terry wasn't immediately available for comment.
“We have a liaison at each of our 46 partnering universities," said ASF President and CEO Caroline Schumacher. “The liaison casts the net across all the different STEM departments, like engineering, biology, physics and aerospace, to find the cream of the crop. A committee then narrows it down to the final two that they want to submit as the nominees for their university. A few of our universities can submit more nominees, like University of Central Florida, which gets three scholarship recipients and six nominees.”
UCF has partnered with ASF since the nonprofit was founded in 1984 by Henry Landwirth and six Mercury 7 astronauts with the mission of ensuring the United States would be the global leader in technology for decades to come.
Pedigree and influence remain core to ASF activities, and this year’s Innovators Week will include such astronauts as Anna Fisher, Jan Davis and Linda Godwin.
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