Starkville native gets research fellowship
May 6, 2005
Tonya Stone
May 6, 2005
A Mississippi State graduate student in mechanical engineering is receiving a 2005 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship worth more than $120,000 over three years of work toward a doctorate.
Tonya W. Stone, a Starkville native and mother of three, is among nearly 1,000 national winners of the NSF fellowship, which provides a $30,000 stipend and $10,500 cost-of-education allowance per recipient annually over the three-year period.
Stone also was selected for a 2005 Ford Foundation Diversity Fellowship that would have provided $66,000 over three years of doctoral work. She had to decline that award because program rules forbid concurrent fellowships.
“I am very excited and honored to have been selected for two very prestigious national awards; I’m encouraged by their confidence in my future abilities as a scholar and researcher,” said Stone, who worked in private industry for eight years before returning to her alma mater in January 2004 to pursue graduate studies.
“Although I was selected for both awards, unfortunately I will only be able to accept one of them, based on their rules,” she pointed out.
The daughter of Ozzie Williams and the late longtime Starkville alderman Harold E. Williams, Tonya and husband Dwayne have three children–Joshua, Jordan and Jasmine. After completing her master’s degree, she plans to start work toward a doctorate next fall.
The NSF awards its coveted graduate fellowships in science, mathematics and engineering for full-time study leading to advanced degrees to individuals who have demonstrated ability and special aptitude. The program is designed to ensure the vitality of the human resource base and reinforce diversity in those fields.
Stone was among only about 60 national winners of pre-doctoral fellowships awarded by the Ford Foundation and administered by the National Research Council of the National Academies. If accepted, the fellowship would have provided the MSU student with a $17,000 stipend and $5,000 allowance annually over three years.
The Ford Foundation fellowships seek to increase the ethnic and racial diversity of the nation’s college and university faculties in a wide variety of academic fields. They recognize individuals demonstrating superior academic achievement and a promise of future achievement as scholars and teachers.
Stone earned a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering at MSU in 1995, working part-time during those years as an undergraduate research assistant in computational field simulation at the university’s ERC (Engineering Research Center).
Upon graduation, Stone worked for eight years as a design engineer for Dow Design and Construction, a division of The Dow Chemical Co. in Houston, Texas. During her Dow career, she served as the lead mechanical engineer for capital projects ranging from $5 million to more than $50 million, including assignments in Germany.
“Tonya has come back to MSU and has she ever,” said professor Mark Horstemeyer, who holds the Center for Advanced Vehicular Systems Chair in Mechanical Engineering at MSU.
Stone’s research topic in her MSU graduate studies is “Using Molecular Dynamics Simulations to Develop Constitutive Relations for Metal Powder Compaction.” She plans to extend her research to include the sintering process in powder metallurgy, and to “bridge the gap between the nanoscale and macroscale.”
“She is working on multi-scale modeling of a powder metals and is doing well,” said Horstemeyer, who is nationally recognized for his work on multi-scale material modeling.