Second-year graduate student Diego Soares Cardoso has been awarded the 2016 Brown Graduate Fellowship.
He will receive $10,000 on his U-bill, $5000 in August and $5000 in January, should he remain a full-time student in good standing at Iowa State.
The focus of the Brown Graduate Fellowship is to strategically advance ISU research in the areas of study which include science, agriculture, and space science. For graduate students to be eligible they must have GPA of 3.5 or above, a total GRE score for verbal plus quantitative of 320 or above, a GRE analytical writing score of 4.0, and show a high level of excellence in both their studies and research.
"At this point I have not started working on a thesis, but I do have a direction for the next few years," says Soares Cardoso.
"I have a bachelor's degree in computer engineering and, broadly speaking, I'm interested in computational economics. More specifically, I have an interest on the multidisciplinary area of complex systems, with special focus on systems involving economic decisions. Although I have not started my own research, I am currently an RA in a project which studies a specific case of such systems -- a watershed model integrating hydrologic, climate and economic systems. The Water & Climate Change (it is a temporary name, a new one is being discussed) is a project from the Department of Geological and Atmospheric Sciences, but also involves researchers from the Department of Civil, Construction and Environmental Engineering and the Department of Economics."
Diego's advisor Peter Orazem says, "In every one of our meetings from our very first, Diego has come in with his plans for the semester. Then he goes out and does it. He is driven to combine his interests in computer science and economics and he consistently demonstrates that he will be very good at it. As an adviser, my job has been to make sure I do not get in his way."