The University of Houston (UH) has announced the Chevron Energy Graduate Fellows award for outstanding candidates engaged in graduate education and research in energy topics from across the campus. Eight students are among the winner of the prestigious one-year $12,000 fellowship, which includes mentoring by faculty experts and the opportunity to engage with subject matter experts at Chevron. Four of them are of Indian-origin and their names are Aparajita Datta, Chirag Goel, Swapnil Sharma and Meghana Idamakanti, according to a university release.
Chevron is an American multinational energy corporation that predominantly operates in oil and gas sector. The UH-Chevron Energy Graduate fellows are given the award for their research in energy-related fields at the University of Houston (UH).
About the winners of the inaugural fellowship, the university said their work focuses on scalable innovations for transformational impact on the energy industry.
Ms Datta is a political science PhD candidate whose research focuses on the intersection of energy, climate and redistributive policies in the US.
"The motivation for my research focus came from my past work evaluating the impact of state climate policies on household energy burden across socioeconomic groups," she said after winning the fellowship.
Another fellow, Chirag Goel's research proposal stems from his passion for nuclear fusion reactions that power the sun and stars and has been driven to replicate a similar process on Earth.
"High-temperature superconductors (HTS) present the opportunity to achieve carbon-free economies by 2050," Goel said.
Meghana Idamakanti, a third-year PhD student hopes to contribute to sustainable energy initiatives, focusing on the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions.
Swapnil Sharma, a PhD student and an Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi graduate co-founded CovRelief to track the availability of hospital beds that helped many people during the COVID-19 pandemic in India.
"We love that Chevron is sponsoring this group of fellows because it's a fantastic way for us to get involved with the students who are working on some of the biggest problems we'll face in society," Chevron Technology Ventures President Jim Gable was quoted as saying in the release.
The selected fellows will engage with Chevron subject matter experts on a quarterly basis and participate in educational and research engagements organised by UH Energy throughout the year.
