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UMass's smallest campus produces the highest number of SMART Scholars

Three ½ûÂþÌìÌà students from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) are among the 2025 recipients of the SMART Scholarship from the U.S Department of Defense (DoD): 

• Jin Feng Lin '22, MS '24, PhD '27 (New Bedford, MA) 
• Eric Savage MS '25, PhD '28 (Fayetteville, NC) 
• Nathanael Winchell '25, MS '27 (Rehoboth, MA) 

The SMART Scholarship is a ; last year, only 9% of applicants were successful. SMART Scholarships offer full tuition funding, an annual stipend, summer internships, mentorship, and guaranteed employment. After graduation, recipients agree to work for the DoD for the same amount of time they received funding for their education.  

½ûÂþÌìÌà leads the entire UMass system in producing SMART Scholars and is among the top 20% of institutions nationwide for SMART Scholar awardees. In 2024, two other ECE students were also awarded DoD SMART Scholarships. 

Lin and Savage are both members of Associate Professor Ruolin Zhou's research group where Lin studies signal processing, wireless communication, and machine learning, and Savage studies cybersecurity.  

Winchell conducts research in underwater acoustics under the mentorship of Chancellor Professor John Buck and as part of the project Acoustic Rainfall Measurement on Global Drifters funded by the Naval Undersea Warfare Center (NUWC).