Applicants for CLAS Dissertation Writing Fellowships must have completed their comprehensive examination to be eligible to apply to receive the award. Fellowships are limited to one recipient per graduate program.
View complete information about CLAS Dissertation Writing Fellowships, including application instructions.
The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (CLAS) has awarded 12 doctoral candidates with CLAS Dissertation Writing Fellowships.
CLAS Dissertation Writing Fellowships provide recipients with a fellowship of $13,750 to support work on the final stages of their dissertations.
The disciplines represented by the recipients for the 2020 award period span the humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences, reflecting the diversity of graduate education in CLAS. The fellows' applications were evaluated by the CLAS Graduate Education Policy Committee, an elected faculty governance body chaired by Associate Dean for Graduate Education Christine Getz.
presenting research
The Dissertation Writing Fellows, and the topics of their dissertations, are:
Jennifer Bjorklund, Chemistry—First-Principles Insights on Aluminum and Actinide Nanocluster Reactivity and Crystallization for Environmental Remediation
Laura Brown, Philosophy—Mediated Ideal Theory
Lin Sun, Communication Studies—Practicing “patriotism”: Cyber-nationalism in China
Lisa Covington, African American Studies—Digital Epistemologies: An Exploration of Suburban Girls of Color Understanding Education
Kenneth Heitritter, Physics & Astronomy—Cosmological and Quantum Gravitational Implications of the Diffeomorphism Field
Minsuk Oh, Health & Human Physiology—Associations of physical activity, fitness, sedentary behavior, and sleep with cardiac fat in middle-aged adults
Runqing Qi, Second Language Acquisition—A Model for Using Authentic Texts in Chinese Reading Instruction
Laurel Sanders, History—“Knowledge of Every Home”: Public Health Nursing in Native American Communities, 1924-1941
Caitlin Sapp, Communication Sciences and Disorders—Meaningful audibility counseling for parents of children with hearing loss
David Cooper, Biology—Functional and adaptive role of polyglutamine in S. cerevisiae GAL11
Jennifer Thines, Geoscience—Geochemical evolution of large-volume silicic magmas from the Afro-Arabian Large Igneous Province
Xun Li, Statistics and Actuarial Science—Bayesian modeling of environmental phenomena
Bjorklund expressed her gratitude for the award, and noted that it reflects the supportive graduate student experience at Iowa.
“Receiving the Dissertation Writing Fellowship from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences is a true privilege and honor as well as an amazing opportunity,” she said. “With this funding, I’m able to focus my time solely on my dissertation and completing my degree with much less stress and financial pressure. By recognizing the importance of my and the other Fellows’ research, CLAS, the Graduate College, and the University of Iowa are demonstrating their respect not just for my work, but for all UI graduate students. I'm very grateful to receive this fellowship—it motivates me, and even excites me, to write the longest and most important paper of my life!”
Christine Getz, CLAS Associate Dean for Graduate Education, said that the CLAS Dissertation Writing Fellowships not only benefit the fellows, but also play an important role in advancing the college’s graduate programs as a whole.
“The purpose of the program is to invest in promising doctoral candidates by providing them time to focus exclusively on writing their dissertations during their final year in the program,” Getz said. “In turn, that investment improves our degree completion rates and reduces the time it takes PhD students to earn their degrees, which are important metrics for evaluating the success of graduate programs and are central to our strategic goals. The range of scholarly expertise represented by the projects of this year’s awardees is very exciting, and I congratulate each of them.”
Graduate students in CLAS programs are enrolled in the Graduate College, which offers numerous opportunities for support and professional development.