New doctoral fellowships to reward outstanding scholars

LAWRENCE – New graduate fellowships will help recruit and support doctoral students at the University of Kansas, a key goal of KU’s Bold Aspirations strategic plan.

Chancellor Bernadette Gray-Little announced the creation of the Chancellor’s Doctoral Fellowships today, a dozen of which will be awarded each year. The fellowships will provide a stipend of $25,000 per year and also cover tuition and fees.

“One of our unique missions as a flagship research university is to provide advanced education to students in a range of fields. Providing this additional support to doctoral students will not only help them complete their degrees on schedule, but will also make KU more competitive when recruiting the next generation of scholars,” said Gray-Little.

Fellowships will be awarded to schools on a rotating basis in line with the distribution of Ph.D. students at the university, meaning roughly half will go to doctoral students in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

In addition to the financial support, recipients will have reduced work responsibilities during their first year and dissertation year. During these two years, the fellowship will be funded by private funds from accounts expended at the direction of the chancellor, with the intervening years funded by the doctoral student’s school or department.

Deans will allocate fellowships to departments to use in recruiting doctoral students for the coming academic year, with the program being administered by the Office of Graduate Studies.