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Madrid Earns NSF Graduate Research Fellowship

April 15, 2010

monica-madridGraduate student Monica Madrid has been awarded an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship that includes a $30,000 stipend and a $10,500 tuition allowance per year for up to three years. 

In its notification to Madrid, NSF's Division of Graduate Education said "Your selection was based on your outstanding abilities and accomplishments, as well as your potential to contribute to strengthening the vitality of the U.S. science and engineering enterprise." 

Madrid conducts her research in collaboration with her faculty advisor, ECE Assistant Professor Jamesina Simpson. She is also a research assistant at UNM's Center for High Technology Materials. Working with Simpson and ECE Professor Majeed Hayat, she is helping to construct full Maxwell's equation models of the interaction of specific synthetic-aperture radar pulses with vibrating structures in a project titled "Co-Registered Vibrometry & Imaging: A Combined Synthetic-Aperture Radar & Fractional-Fourier Transform Approach." The project began in 2008 and is funded by the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration. The team is using the finite-difference time--domain method, a robust, grid-based, wide-band computational technique. 

Madrid also just learned that she was selected as the "2010 Outstanding Female Graduate Engineering Student" by the IEEE Albuquerque Section (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers). The award recognizes a Section member who has distinguished herself during her graduate career with outstanding academic performance, interest, and dedication to the electrotechnology profession. Madrid will receive that award at IEEE's May 17 awards banquet. 
Madrid also received support for her research in 2009 from a Selected Professions Fellowship of the American Association of University Women.