The University of South Florida has raised the annual stipend for its prestigious A.P.J. Abdul Kalam postgraduate Fellowship from $18,000 to $ 22,000.  In addition, the university also waives the winner’s tuition fees for upto four years.

The Kalam Fellowship, launched in 2016, is offered to a student who has graduated (or is about to graduate) from an Indian university and is seeking to pursue a PhD at USF in any of the following fields:  Applied Anthropology, Applied Physics, Business Ph.D. programs, Cell Biology, Microbiology & Molecular Biology, Chemistry, Computer Science & Engineering, Engineering, Criminology, Integrative Biology, Marine Science and Psychology.

This year, Arjun Kadian was selected from an impressive group of candidates to receive the fellowship for his PhD research proposal on “how misinformation spreads on social media…exploring the phenomenon of fake news and its impact.”   A Master’s degree graduate in Business Analytics and Information Systems from USF’s Muma College of Business, Kadian received his Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Pune in 2008. He worked for Infosys for 8 years before joining USF.

The Fellowship was set up to honor President Kalam who visited the USF campus in Tampa, Florida, in 2012, winning a lot of admirers among students, faculty and the university leadership.  The Fellowship has so far been awarded to Avijit Sengupta of IIT Bombay, Veena Subramanian of the Indian Institute of Sciences in Bangalore. Both of them are currently pursuing their PhD research at USF.

The deadline for applications for the 2019 Fellowship is March 1, 2019.

(Details available at https://www.usf.edu/world/resources/kalamfellowship.aspx )