Making a Difference in Graduate and Professional Student Support

Ben Singer

What do you get when you cross an MD and a PhD?

Perhaps a better understanding of epileptic seizures.

As a doctoral student in neuroscience who is pursing his MD at Michigan , Ben Singer originated a mathematical model and analysis of directional signaling in the brain during epileptic seizures that could provide a clearer picture of the mechanisms involved in seizing.

His doctoral research also included an investigation of neural processing in the sense of smell. This work required time-intensive lab experiments that would not have been possible if he were teaching as a graduate student instructor to make ends meet. Rather, his Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship gave him the ability to focus intensely on his work in the lab.

“Those experiments took eight to 10 hours in a block,” he said. “If I had to break off and teach for an hour, I would have lost days and days of research time, and it would have taken so much longer to complete my research and my thesis. The Predoctoral Fellowship was absolutely critical,” said Singer.

Singer received his PhD in 2007 and is a member of the Medical School Class of 2010.

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Jennifer Gates-Foster

For Jennifer Gates-Foster, the road to Egypt's Eastern Desert was paved with a Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship.

The classical archaeologists said the fellowship gave her the ability to dig more deeply into her research by returning to Egypt and attending important overseas conferences. The end results speak for themselves. Gates-Foster's thesis earned a Rackham Distinguished Dissertation Award, she was selected as a junior research fellow at Cambridge University's Darwin College, and is now an assistant classics professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

While the stipends and classroom experience she gained as a graduate student instructor at Michigan were of real value, she said the Rackham fellowship enabled her to leave Ann Arbor for the crucial December/January dig season when the desert climate cools enough to work in relative comfort. That trip would not have been possible if she were teaching.

“Having the ability to go back into the field and to attend conferences in that final year was so important,” said Gates-Foster, a specialist in the Ptolemaic Period from 323 to 31 B.C. “I would not have had the opportunity to focus like I did without the fellowship.”

Rackham Fellowships, according to Gates-Foster, are a crucial element in the funding Michigan can provide graduates. Access to such assistance attracts top scholars.

“I definitely would not have come to Michigan without the support I had from Rackham,” said the Mississippi native and University of Virginia graduate. “I was the first person in my family to pursue a graduate degree. It just wasn't possible for my family to support my graduate studies.”

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Luna Khirfan

With a dissertation exploring the impact of tourism on the world's most historic cities, Luna Khirfan's research took her to such locales as Acre , Israel , Aleppo , Syria and Al-Salt in her native Jordan.

Yet travel to such ancient sites was anything but simple given regional hostilities, visa restrictions and the fact that once she visited Israel , she would never be allowed into Syria . So, to conduct her research in the field, she needed flexibility.

The assistant professor in the School of Planning at the University of Waterloo said she got that and more from the two graduate fellowships she received at Michigan.

“Financially they were important, but they were also rewarding because they made me feel like someone appreciated the work I was doing,” Khirfan said, noting that such support inspired her to push her research to the limits.

She received a Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship and a Barbour Fellowship, an endowed fellowship established in 1914 to assist outstanding female scholars from Asia and the Middle East . While she said she enjoyed teaching as a graduate student, the fellowships helped her focus completely on her work and to travel on a schedule that wasn't always her own. When Khirfan's visa was ultimately approved to visit Israel , for example, she had to move with an agility that would not have been possible had she been committed to a teaching assignment.

The fellowships also provided her with a deadline, motivating her to complete her work before her funding expired rather than relying on teaching stipends from semester to semester.

“Without the fellowships, my studies could have taken a couple of more years,” said Khirfan, who received her Michigan PhD in Urban and Regional Planning as well as the coursework for her graduate certificate in Museum Studies within six years.

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