Brevett Earns GEM Full Fellowship to Pursue Stanford Ph.D.

Thurston Brevett COE’18 has earned a GEM Full Fellowship to support his doctoral study in electrical engineering at Stanford University.

Brevett, a member of the University Scholars and Honors Programs, is an electrical engineer with a primary interest in remote sensing. Moving from rigorous coursework into the puzzles and challenges of research, Brevett joined the Awareness and Localization of Explosives-Related Threats (ALERT) lab in his first year on campus. Brevett’s work on the lab’s synthetic aperture radar (SAR), designing filtering techniques and surface reconstruction algorithms, not only helped the lab earn a $1.2 million grant but also, and more importantly, helped significantly advance the ability of future airport personnel scanners to detect concealed non-metallic objects. While the applications of this work in the realm of airport security are clear, Brevett’s drive to help us “see” better and image the world around us with greater clarity has implications in any number of fields: detecting and locating heartbeats hidden within rubble, mapping the unknown ocean floor, identifying and analyzing a tumor that might not be apparent to the human eye.

Brevett is also a passionate educator and advocate for educational access, having undertaken research on parental and family engagement with Boston Partners in Education, chaired the Pre-College Initiative of the Black Engineering Student Society, and co-founded Bits and Bots, a program that teaches robotics to underserved youth in Boston.

Brevett’s fellowship is provided by GEM, a network of leading corporations, government laboratories, universities, and research institutions that enables qualified students from underrepresented communities to pursue graduate education in applied science and engineering. GEM Fellows receive financial, academic, and mentoring support from both academic and corporate partners.

Brevett’s graduate education will also be supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship,, a prestigious award that recognizes an individual’s potential to make significant contributions to research, teaching and industrial applications in science, mathematics and engineering and provides up to $138,000 in combined graduate tuition and stipend funding. Brevett was one of 20 Northeastern affiliates to receive the NSF Fellowship this year. In addition, Brevett was named a finalist for the 2018 Rhodes and Knight-Hennessy Scholarships.