CHAMPAIGN, Ill. – Six University of Illinois Ph.D. students will receive a $20,000 FMC Technologies Inc. Fellowship for the 2014-15 academic year, and three master’s students will each receive $12,000.
The fellowship program, established in 1971, annually honors outstanding graduate students in business administration, economics, engineering, finance or related fields.
The 2014-15 recipients from the Urbana-Champaign campus are: Vladimir Alvarez Peineres, MBA; Piyush Gupta, Ph.D., civil and environmental engineering; Sichao Ma, Ph.D., chemistry; John O’Hara, MBA and master’s in agriculture; and Anish Shenoy, Ph.D., mechanical engineering. There were three recipients from the UIC campus and one from UIS.
The final selections were made by a committee with representatives of FMC Technologies Inc. the University of Illinois and the U. of I. Foundation.
The FMC Technologies Inc. Scholarship Fund, formerly called the FMC Educational Fund, was originally established as the Link-Belt Educational Fund in 1963 with a donation from U. of I. alumnus Bert A. Gayman. A few years later, Link-Belt merged into the FMC Corporation, which later became FMC Technologies Inc. Intending to provide education and research opportunities, the fund now provides more than $360,000 annually for undergraduate scholarships and graduate fellowships at Illinois.
Gayman, a Champaign native who earned a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering at the U. of I. in 1897, spent his entire career with Link-Belt in Chicago and chose to remain an anonymous donor to the educational fund until 1973, a year before his death.
