Computer science senior earns NSF fellowship
April 20, 2012
STARKVILLE, Miss. – An exceptional undergraduate performance has earned a national fellowship for a computer science senior.
The National Science Foundation has selected Jonathan Harper for an annual $30,000 graduate research fellowship, which he will receive for the next three years. An additional annual award supplement of more than $10,000 will cover the cost of tuition.
A native of Meridian, Harper will enroll this summer in the doctoral degree program at the University of California, Berkeley, where he plans to research programming languages for high performance computing.
In addition to academic requirements, NSF fellowship program also asks applicants to write three original essays and complete a research proposal. Harper said that he was able to pull from his experiences as an undergraduate to complete that process.
“Mississippi State has a lot of research activities for undergraduates, especially in computer science,” Harper said. “I’ve had the opportunity to work in computational biology and at the High Performance Computing Collaboratory, which both provided excellent experience.”
Following his May graduation from MSU, Harper plans to almost immediately move to California to begin his graduate-level research. This will be his second time serving as a researcher at U.C. Berkeley. He spent the summer of 2011 on its campus as part of a NSF-sponsored research experience for undergraduates.
He has also been selected for a chancellor’s fellowship from Berkeley. This additional award will cover two additional years of graduate study.
Harper, a graduate of the Mississippi School for Math and Science, is the son of Debra Harper of Alpharetta, Ga., and Randy Harper of Meridian.
For more information about the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships, visit http://www.nsfgrfp.org/.