Stephen Martin, an Associate Professor in the Chemical Engineering Department at Virginia Tech, has been awarded a AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellowship. Martin will spend the 2018-2019 academic year on sabbatical working in the Advanced Manufacturing Office at the Department of Energy, located within the Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy in Washington, DC.

Martin is among 275 scientists and engineers who will spend a year serving professionally in federal agencies and congressional offices. As highly trained scientists and engineers, the U.S. government benefits from the contributions of STPF fellows, while they learn first-hand about federal policymaking and implementation.

The fellowships are operated as part of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) mandate to advance science and serve society. The program aims to support evidence-based policymaking by engaging the knowledge and analytical mindset of science and engineering experts, and foster leaders for a strong U.S. science and technology enterprise. Fellows represent a broad range of disciplines, backgrounds and career stages.

The 2018-19 class is comprised of 275 fellows sponsored by AAAS and partner societies. Of these, one fellow will serve in the Federal Judicial Center, 33 will serve in Congress, and 241 in the executive branch among 19 agencies or departments.

“I am excited about the opportunity to spend a year in a new environment working on a broad range of problems at the interface of science, technology, and policy,” Martin said. “I am looking forward to meeting and interacting with people in government, industry, and academia in addition to making new connections.”

Since the program’s inception in 1973, more than 3,000 fellows have supported the executive, judicial and legislative branches of federal government seeding every corner of Washington and beyond with a high caliber of scientific know-how. After the fellowship, many fellows remain in the policy arena working at the federal, state, regional or international level. Others pursue careers in industry or the nonprofit sector. Those who choose academia often include in their work teaching or mentoring students to understand the policy context for research and the importance of science communication.

Visit www.aaas.org/stpf to learn about the AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellowships.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is the world’s largest general scientific society and publisher of the journal Science, as well as Science Translational Medicine; Science Signaling; a digital, open-access journal, Science Advances; Science Immunology; and Science Robotics. AAAS was founded in 1848 and includes nearly 250 affiliated societies and academies of science, serving 10 million individuals. Science has the largest paid circulation of any peer-reviewed general science journal in the world. The nonprofit AAAS is open to all and fulfills its mission to “advance science and serve society” through initiatives in science policy, international programs, science education, public engagement, and more. For additional information about AAAS, see www.aaas.org.