UNMC’s Payne is Blue Waters Fellow

William Payne, a graduate student in the department of pharmaceutical sciences, is one of six graduate students in the nation to receive the 2017 Blue Waters Fellowship award.

The fellowship is sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF), which supports Blue Waters, a sustained petascale computing system located at the University of Illinois.

The Blue Waters supercomputer can complete more than 1 quadrillion calculations per second on a sustained basis and more than 13 times that at peak speed, which is three million times faster than the average laptop.

Each fellow receives a $38,000 stipend, up to $12,000 in tuition allowance, an allocation of up to 50,000 node-hours on the powerful Blue Waters petascale computing system, and funds for travel to a Blue Waters Symposium to present research progress and results.

As part of his application, Payne submitted a research proposal about designing better polymers in an effort to formulate better nanomedicines.

In May, he will attend a weeklong conference in Redmond, Ore., sponsored by the NSF, where he will be introduced as a fellow. Next year he will return to present on his research.

“I was very excited to receive this competitive fellowship,” Payne said. “This not only helps to establish me in the field of nanomedicine, especially in design of nanotherapeutics, but serves as an indication of the high quality research we have at UNMC.”