Holly Dinkel, a Ph.D. student in aerospace engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, is one of 110 out of 825 doctoral students in the U. S. and Canada who were nominated, selected to receive a $20,000 Scholar Award from the P.E.O. Sisterhood. She was sponsored by Chapter AL of Huntsville, AL.
Dinkel received a NASA Space Technology Graduate Research Opportunities award and began a Ph.D. program at Illinois in 2020 working with Professor Tim Bretl and with Brian Coltin and Trey Smith in the NASA Ames Research Center Intelligent Robotics Group. She researches Representing and Manipulating Deformable Linear Objects for applications in robotics.
The P.E.O. Scholar Awards were established in 1991 to provide substantial merit-based awards for women of the United States and Canada who are pursuing a doctoral-level degree at an accredited college or university. Scholar Awards recipients are a select group of women chosen for their high level of academic achievement and their potential for having a positive impact on society.
The P.E.O. Sisterhood, founded January 21, 1869, at Iowa Wesleyan College, Mount Pleasant, Iowa, is a philanthropic educational organization dedicated to supporting higher education for women. There are approximately 6,000 local chapters in the United States and Canada with nearly a quarter of a million active members.
For more about P.E.O., or the Philanthropic Educational Organization, visit their website.