It’s not unusual to be an engineer who wants to change the world. But it is rare to receive the kind of no-strings-attached support that could turn that vision into reality.
Graduating Lehigh University senior Harrison Jenkins ’25 was recently invited into the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program. The NSF GRFP is a five-year fellowship that provides three years of financial support for graduate study and is meant to “ensure the quality, vitality, and diversity of the scientific and engineering workforce of the United States.” The award supports the recipient, rather than a specific research focus. It’s that distinction that has Jenkins, a mechanical engineering major with a minor in aerospace engineering, most excited.
“The robotic technology that I want to develop as a PhD student is an understudied area,” says Jenkins, who will be attending the Georgia Institute of Technology in the fall. “There aren’t many grants associated with it, and so one of the blessings of getting the GRFP is that I’ll have the freedom to do work that I believe has the potential to be really impactful, and do it at a really high level.”
That work is aimed toward a lofty research goal—establishing solar farms in outer space.
“I truly believe such infrastructure would revolutionize the way we get clean energy,” he says, “and do it at a scale that would be economically viable while generating electricity for millions of people.”
Pursuing a PhD and disrupting the clean energy industry wasn’t always Jenkins’ ambition. But when he landed an internship at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California the summer before his junior year, he conversed with one of the lab’s scientists about the value of a graduate education and the opportunities it could provide. Until then, he’d assumed he’d maybe pursue a master’s degree and jump right into industry. That assumption changed for good after meeting with Roberto Palmieri, an associate professor of computer science and engineering in Lehigh’s P.C. Rossin College of Engineering and Applied Science.
“He knew that I was interested in both space and robotics, and that I wanted to create technology that would benefit people,” says Jenkins. “He drove home the point that if changing the world was what I wanted to do, then a PhD program would help me do it.”
Jenkins began the process of applying for the NSF GRFP last spring, working closely with Yvonne Lee, director of Lehigh’s Graduate Writers’ Studio and two mechanical engineering faculty members—his advisor, Keith Moored, and Subhrajit Bhattacharya—to target and refine his research proposal and personal statement.
Jenkins was well-aware that building celestial solar farms would require expertise from a wide range of disciplines. And so with guidance from the two associate professors, he narrowed his focus down to a few key robotic technologies that would enable solar structures to be assembled autonomously in space.
For his personal statement, Lee guided him toward his “why.”
“She helped me articulate my mission,” says Jenkins. “I aim to reflect the love of Christ by producing life-altering technologies that will alleviate suffering on a global level. That is the ultimate goal of my engineering career.”
Jenkins traces the start of his fascination with cosmology to a fifth-grade unit on the solar system. The extremes of space—the heat, the cold, the distance, the size, the inconceivable magnitude of it all—captured his imagination. Even as a little kid, he understood the planetary scale was unlike anything he could experience on earth, and he wanted to learn more. As a high schooler in Oakland, California, he excelled in science, math, and physics—and on the football field—and thrived when he was problem-solving with his hands. So when it came time to figure out a major, it didn’t take long to land on aerospace engineering.
He came to Lehigh on a Posse Scholarship, which grants full-tuition awards to students with “extraordinary leadership potential.” Once at Lehigh, and while playing defensive back for the university’s football team, Jenkins received the Patti Grace Smith Fellowship. The fellowship provides exceptional Black students with, among other things, their first work experience in the aerospace industry. Jenkins spent the summer before his sophomore year working at iSpace, a Japanese-based lunar exploration company with facilities in Colorado, as a member of their propulsion team. With that experience on his resume, he secured the JPL internship, during which the conversation that steered him to this most recent award took place.
Earlier this year at Lehigh, Jenkins was in the lab, where he works with Dr. Moored on computational simulations of the flow interactions between fish swimming in schools, when he received an email from Lee.
“She said the NSF results were out, and that I should take a look,” he says. “Right after that, I got another email from NSF saying, ‘Congratulations.’ I almost cried. And not just because I got the fellowship, but because the first email was from her.”
He says that moment reflected what he’d felt throughout the entire application process—boundless, tireless support from the Lehigh community. He’d had a network of people who were there during every step of the application process to guide, mentor, and believe in him. And so it meant the world to him that one of those people had taken the time to scroll through hundreds of recipients’ names, looking for his, and reached out with a message that would change his world—and perhaps, someday, our whole world.
“It’s just one of the beautiful things about Lehigh,” he says. “You have access to all these incredible people who want to help you achieve your dream.”
—Story by Christine Fennessy
