Grand Challenges Fellowship Program pilot
The Grand Challenges program is pleased to announce the availability of three graduate student fellowships for Spring 2025.
Overview
The Grand Challenges fellowship pilot program seeks to engage graduate students in Grand Challenges team research. The graduate fellowship will provide a research assistantship at 0.25 FTE/10 hours per week in Spring 2025, with the potential to extend through Summer 2025 at 0.50 FTE/20 hours per week. The award for Spring includes up to nine hours of tuition and fees, and assistantships come with health insurance.
The aim of the fellowship is to prepare graduate students to take a small leadership role on a team and assist in mentoring an undergraduate student who will start the program in Summer 2025. Each of the three teams will provide a faculty mentor for their student.
Student obligations
Students will be embedded within the teams (one per team across three teams) and will work on a team-designated research project, meeting at least monthly with team members.
In addition to their roles within the teams, the three graduate students will also meet twice in the semester as a cohort. These hourlong meetings will teach the students about 1) how to create a research poster, and 2) how to provide and receive mentorship.
Graduate students will have the option to attend monthly Zancada meetings as well, which will provide them with additional access to interdisciplinary activity as well as professional development activities.
Team Opportunities
Child Health
The Child Health team would like to hire a graduate student who is interested in both quantitative and qualitative research to conduct secondary analyses of datasets relating child well-being outcomes to environmental exposures, and to housing instability.
Just Transition to Green Energy
The graduate student would assist with focus group and in-depth interviews (notetaking, script development, management of schedule); and provide support writing literature reviews and landscape analyses to support manuscript development.
Sustainable Space Research
The research project "Alkali-Activated Simulated Regolith for Space Construction" will investigate the potential of alkali activation of simulated regolith using indigenous activators found in space, aiming to advance habitat construction for future space exploration. The graduate student could conduct this research at the CCEE lab at UNM, utilizing NASA-certified simulated regolith available on the market.
To apply
Please submit the following to grandchallenges@unm.edu by November 15 at 11:59 p.m. to be considered for the Spring 2025 graduate research assistantship:
- Your CV
- A letter of interest of no more than one page that includes:
- Your name, email address, and Banner ID number
- A description of your research experience and interest in working with a specific team
- The name, phone number, and email address of an academic reference that can speak to your research experience or potential.
Students may apply to work with more than one team but should submit separate letters of interest for each one.
Please contact grandchallenges@unm.edu with any questions about the fellowship or application process.
