Department of Materials Science and Engineering

NSF fellowship opens doors for Jorgensen

 

When Danny Jorgensen paused during the middle of a recent intramural bowling match, he thought he was just taking a phone call from a friend.

Instead, his life was taking an unexpected turn.

What Jorgensen heard was that he had been awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship. And he heard it from Sasha Kemmet (electrical and computer engineering), Iowa State University’s only other fellowship winner.

“I didn’t know about it until then,” says Jorgensen, a senior in materials science and engineering. “Sasha had been checking for the announcement online. I didn’t even know she was applying for it.”

The fellowship, awarded to about 10 percent of those who applied from throughout the nation, funds three years of graduate study. Applicants submitted essays, research plans, and supporting materials to show how their planned research demonstrated intellectual merit and promised benefits to society.

“I’m happy and lucky that I got this because it’s opened doors to other areas,” Jorgensen says. “There are a couple of projects that I had been looking at. This funding gives me free range to produce research.”

The research that Jorgensen proposed to NSF focused on understanding and modeling the freezing of palladium-silicon alloys. But the NSF fellowship has created some options, and Jorgensen plans to pursue one of them: biomedical engineering. It’s a field in which he can find new applications for his strong interest in metallurgy. The path will take him to Northwestern University and a little closer to his family home in Naperville, Illinois.

Despite the change in research plans, Jorgensen’s professional ambitions remain much more defined.

“I’ve had this idea since I’ve gotten to college that I want to be a professor,” Jorgensen says. “My passion has always been to teach. As a professor, I would get to tie in what I enjoy learning about and what I enjoy teaching. Throw in research, and it’s as perfect a job as I could imagine.”

 

 

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