I received the Rackham Doctoral Intern Fellowship from the University of Michigan to support an industry summer internship aligned with my dissertation research. The fellowship is designed to help doctoral students apply their technical skills in non-academic settings, while maintaining continuity in their doctoral progress and support.
This award provided supplementary funding to my Structural Forensics Intern role at Thornton Tomasetti, San Francisco. The fellowship provided relocation support and additional health care coverage, making it financially feasible to live and work in the Bay Area for the duration of the internship. It also formally recognized the internship as an integral part of my doctoral training, linking day-to-day project work in structural forensics and performance-based assessment back to the broader goals of my PhD in deployable and reconfigurable structures.