Selected Professions Fellows

2011–12 Summary
Total fellowships: 22
Eligible applicants: 60
Women of color: 40%
Total awards: $350,000

Selected Professions Fellowships provide opportunities for women to pursue graduate and first-professional degrees in designated fields where women traditionally have been underrepresented and where the employment outlook and earnings potential are strong. Recipients must be U.S. citizens or permanent residents.

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Established in 1970 with a $25,000 grant from the Max C. Fleischmann Foundation, Selected Professions Fellowships originally focused on opening doors for women in the male-dominated fields of law and medicine. The focus has since expanded to include science and technology as the demand for a technologically skilled work force has grown without proportional representation by women.

Fellowships in architecture, computer and information sciences, engineering, and mathematics and statistics are currently available to women at various stages of their graduate training. To address the underrepresentation of women of color in promising professions and encourage cultural diversity in these areas, fellowships for business administration, law, and medicine have been available only to women of color since 1991.

A 1997–98 Selected Professions Fellowship allowed Angela Lindner to pursue her research in the face of discrimination and go on to support other women interested in the field of engineering. AAUW support helped Mariya Lazebnik, a 2007–08 Selected Professions Fellow, complete doctoral research on the use of electromagnetic energy at microwave frequencies for breast cancer detection and publish a paper that was selected as a finalist for the Roberts' Prize. After a career as a corporate lawyer, 2001-02 Selected Professions Fellow Jessica Faye Carter published Double Outsiders: How Women of Color Can Succeed in Corporate America, and went on to begin her own consulting company. And a 2005-06 Selected Professions Fellowship helped Freda Brady, an electrical engineer and lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve, complete her MBA and go on to become a senior consultant with IBM.

The 2011-12 Selected Professions Fellows are meeting the challenge by working to understand how pollutants commonly found in the environment affect the human body in order to design appropriate engineering interventions to reduce exposure and minimize negative health effects; developing technologies that can solve many of the issues surrounding the need for sustainable living structures on Earth today and for the future of space exploration; and studying vernacular architecture, specifically on the row house, in order to develop creative adaptive reuse projects for these houses that not only preserve the structure but also educate the people who visit them.

AAUW thanks the following 2011 Selected Professions Fellowship panelists: Jumoke Landeji-Osias (MD), chair, engineering, computer science, mathematics; Jaime Caneves (FL), architecture; Montré D. Carodine (AL), law; Abbie Griffin (UT), business; J. Carmelo Interlando (CA), engineering, computer science, mathematics; Susan Keay (MD), medicine.