History & Goals

In 2007, the Chevron Corporation allocated funds to the graduate students of the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences of Columbia University in the City of New York and the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory (LDEO), in order to support, encourage, and stimulate student research. The aim of the Chevron Student Initiative Fund is to provide support for those graduate students with creative, original research plans who are unable to procure alternative funding.

A student committee will accept the duties of reviewing student proposals and distributing funds to the students whose proposals are deemed by the committee to be the most meritorious based upon set criteria. Thus, not only will the Chevron Student Initiative Fund promote student research, but it will also allow students to engage in the peer-review process. This process, carried out within the LDEO community, will offer students the invaluable opportunity to interact with one another in a manner representative of the larger-scale funding initiatives that the students will inevitably be involved with after the completion of their degrees.