Valeria Saro-Cortes, a senior in the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering department, has been awarded a 2019 PhD Engineering Full Fellowship by the National GEM Consortium. GEM is “a network of leading corporations, government laboratories, top universities, and top research institutions that enables qualified students from underrepresented communities to pursue graduate education in applied science and engineering.” Valeria’s fellowship was sponsored by Draper, where she will conduct an internship this summer. Then the fellowship will support her PhD candidacy at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the Mechanical Science and Engineering department, where she was also awarded the Graduate College Master's Fellowship and MechSE Distinguished Fellowship. Valeria has conducted research since 2016 in the lab of Professor Jonathan P. Singer and was a New Jersey Space Grant Consortium Academic Year Fellow in 2016-2017.