School of Interactive Computing Ph.D. student Amber Solomon was awarded with the Alfred P. Sloan Minority Graduate Scholarship, which provides three years of support for students who have recently completed the Ph.D. qualifying exam.

Georgia Tech Sloan Fellows receive a stipend supplement of $10,000 per year for three years, which is added to the other funding the student is currently receiving. They also receive a professional development fund of $10,000 to be used over the three years of the award on expenses like books and journals, professional travel, and direct research costs. They receive inclusion in academic and career enrichment, mentoring, and retention activities conducted by the Georgia Tech University Center of Exemplary Mentoring.

The program is sponsored by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and seeks to increase the number of outstanding engineering Ph.D. graduates from under-represented populations. To be eligible for the award, the student must be in either the College of Engineering or the College of Computing, a U.S. citizen, and have passed the qualifying exam within the past 12 months.

“It’s a great honor to win,” Solomon said. “Sloan is nationwide, and I competed against the best students from top-tier schools like MIT and Cornell. I am really grateful to have the money it provides for professional development.”

Solomon is in her third year pursuing a Ph.D. in Human-Centered Computing, working with advisors Betsy DiSalvo and Mark Guzdial. She started in fall 2015 and hopes to finish in 2020. Her research is in computing education, and she is interested in advancing the understanding the role of spatial reasoning in learning computing. She hopes that by exploring this role more diverse students can succeed in computing.