The UA/NASA Space Grant Graduate Fellowship Program provides fellowships that are prestigious and desirable for both students and for sponsoring UA departments. Awards include 16K stipend (10K provided by UA as Space Grant cost sharing and 6K provided by sponsoring departments. In addition, UA provides full out-of-state tuition waivers, departments provide a full registration award, a $750/year travel award for students to travel and make presentations on project activities and results at professional meetings, and student health insurance is provided with NASA Space Grant funds. Though totals vary based on individual circumstances, the range of values of awards made for FY 2018 is $21,620-$51,837 (depending on scope and residency). In addition, one $10,000 fellowship is awarded to a University of Arizona Planetary Sciences graduate student who is deemed to be highly deserving of funding to continue educational and professional progression in NASA-related STEM.

Fellowships emphasize National Space Grant and NASA Education goals and objectives by requiring awardees to design, propose and lead high-quality outreach projects, focusing on the Fellows NASA-focused research area. Outreach programs are highly varied, geared to inspire, engage and educate American citizens. Each outreach project is designed around a student developed and driven collaborative partnership with a variety of local, state, federal and tribal institutions and organizations.

Each applicant must complete an application, and propose a fully developed (one to two-year) outreach project, including providing letters of support from stakeholder organizations, statements of goals, objectives, timelines and infrastructure development plans. Departments competitively select students to nominate and fund as Space Grant fellows. Department-nominated applications are forwarded for review by members of the UA/NASA Space Grant Steering Committee, who read and rank applications and makes the final selection of awardees and alternates. Efforts are made to include students from a broad mix of earth and space science/engineering and education-related departments, and to include a gender and ethnically diverse group of awardees.

Two FY18 UA Graduate Fellow outreach projects are directed to pre-college audiences and three to Informal Education audiences and one to a higher education audience (see Fellowship Sub-Element activity reports). They are: 1) STEM Lesson Development with Teachers at the Santa Rita Experimental Range; 2) Top to Bottom: Stories of the Critical Zone; 3) Developing an Online Hub for Optics Demonstrations; 4)Development and Validation of the Planet Formation Concept Inventory; 5) Create STEM Hackerspace for Pre-College Teachers and Students; and 6) Pima Air and Space Museum: Space Gallery Upgrade. To leverage program NASA dollars and to create competitive and attractive award packages for Fellows, sponsoring departments and colleges provide cost-sharing for fellows.