Jamin Hanna, Von Hermoso, and Benjamin Kreider have been selected as the 2025 Bodenheimer Fellowship recipients in the Min H. Kao Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS).
Bondenheimer Fellowships, valued at $12,000 per year per person, are combined with graduate teaching assistant/graduate research assistant positions, bringing the total value of the package to more than $52,000 per year. The fellowships are awarded to deserving EECS graduates from the University of Tennessee to encourage them to remain at UT for graduate school.
Jamin Hanna
Hanna is a senior who will be graduating this month with a degree in computer science. The Parrottsville, Tennessee native will be returning to UT to pursue his PhD in computer science. Hanna will be working in the TENNLab neuromorphic computing research group under the advisement of Professor James Plank.
“Winning this award means a great deal. It reminded me that I have many people to thank and much to be thankful for. In particular, I owe many thanks to Dr. Plank and Dr. (Catherine) Schuman. It is their support that made winning this award possible for me. I also owe a debt of gratitude to the members of the selection committee. This award would not exist were it not for their contributions to the department and their volunteering of their time. I am moved by their generosity and look to make the most of the opportunity they have provided to me.”
Von Hermoso
Hermoso is a senior who will be graduating this month with a degree in computer engineering. The Clarksville, Tennessee native will be returning to UT to pursue his master’s degree through the five-year BS/MS program for EECS, where he’ll be working as a full-time graduate research assistant under Professor Benjamin Blalock.
During the summer, Hermoso will be interning at Texas Instruments in Knoxville for the third time as an analog design engineer. Hermoso wants to become an analog design engineer full-time to help develop new and creative ideas that will make a positive impact on the world.
“By winning this fellowship, I feel some sense of validation in all the work I’ve done so far in my undergraduate career and that I should continue on this path in grad school and even further beyond.”
Benjamin Kreider
Kreider is a senior who is graduating this month with a degree in electrical engineering. After a short design verification internship at Texas Instruments in the summer, the Knoxville native will be working as a graduate assistant for Nuclear Physics Professor Robert Grzywacz. Kreider’s area of focus for graduate school is nuclear instrumentation, specifically helping develop next-generation particle detectors and the accompanying electronics for nuclear physics experiments.
After completing his PhD in electrical engineering, Kreider wants to pursue a career in research and found a startup company.
“Winning this fellowship was the culmination of four years of hard work. I feel incredibly honored. This fellowship also has a special significance for me given my interests in nuclear instrumentation. UT and the East Tennessee area have a long history in this field of electronics. I hope to carry on the tradition in my work with Dr. Grzywacz, though I am admittedly standing on the shoulders of giants.”
History of the Fellowship
The Bodenheimer Fellowships were established in honor of Robert E. Bodenheimer, who taught ECE courses at UT for nearly 40 years prior to his retirement. The primary benefactor has been one of his students, Michael C. Crabtree, who received his BS in 1973 and MS in 1975 from UT, both in electrical engineering. Crabtree was one of the founders of CTI (Siemens) Molecular Imaging, Inc.
Contact
Rhiannon Potkey (865-974-0683, rpotkey@utk.edu)