The Department of Defense has made some progress at funneling future engineers and scientists into a field whose numbers have diminished over time, the Pentagon’s top official for research and engineering said yesterday.
Zachary Lemnios, the assistant secretary of defense for research and engineering, told a gathering that the Pentagon has been trying to cope with an unfortunate combination of fewer individuals entering the scientific field along with retirements and stiffer competition from abroad.
“We sort of are facing this perfect storm of realities,” Lemnios said at the U.S. Innovation Summit hosted by fedscoop in Washington.
But Lemnios said a scholarship fund set up by the Pentagon to provide grants to graduate and undergraduate students who major in the scientific fields has made some headway in dampening the problem. So far, the Science, Mathematics And Research for Transformation, or SMART, program has graduated more than 700 students in the scientific field.
“These are hotshots,” Lemnios said. “This is the best and brightest of many, many first rate schools.”
The grants provide $25,000 plus tuition, and in return the recipient agrees to work in a government lab for a duration equaling the number of years the student was in the SMART program, he said.