CHAMPAIGN, Ill. – Seven University of Illinois graduate students – including three from the Urbana-Champaign campus – will each receive a $10,000 FMC Technologies Inc. Fellowship for the 2010-2011 academic year.
The fellowship program, established in 1971, annually honors outstanding graduate students in business administration, economics, engineering, finance or related fields.
The 2010-2011 recipients, all from Champaign, are Shrenik Kothari and Surya Mishra, both of whom are pursuing a master’s degree in mechanical science and engineering; and Jennifer Schmidt, who is pursuing a master’s in business administration.
The winners were chosen by a committee representing FMC, the U. of I. and the U. of I. Foundation.
The FMC Technologies Inc. Scholarship Fund, formerly called the FMC Educational Fund, was established as the Link-Belt Educational Fund in 1963 by U. of I. alumnus Bert A. Gayman, a Link-Belt executive. A few years later, Link-Belt merged into FMC Corp., which later became FMC Technologies Inc. Gayman, a Champaign native who earned a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering in 1897, spent his entire career with Link-Belt in Chicago and chose to remain an anonymous donor to this educational fund until 1973, a year before his death. The fund now provides about $110,000 annually for undergraduate scholarships and graduate fellowships at Illinois.
