Successful applicants are awarded either Graduate Teaching Assistantships (GTAs) or Graduate Research Assistantships (GRAs). New students are supported with a GTA stipend starting at $23,000 for both PhD and Master’s students, a tuition waiver, fee waiver, and health insurance. GRAs are assigned by individual faculty members who have available grant support for a particular line of research. Many of our students hold external fellowships (1 in 12 have received an NSF GRF, for example), and we strongly encourage all applicants to apply for such fellowships, including:
External Fellowships:
- NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program. (Note that as of Fall 2016, you may now only apply once as a grad student.)
- Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship (DOE CSGF). For students in fields of study that advance the use of high-performance computing to solve specific, complex science and engineering problems (including biological sciences).
- Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowships.
- UT’s Office of Research maintains lists of external science and engineering fellowships for graduate students (and post-docs).
Internal Fellowships:
External Grants:
- NSF GROW (Graduate Research Opportunities Worldwide). GROW expands opportunities for U.S. graduate students to engage in international research collaboration. GROW is open only to recipients of the Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP).
- AAUW American Fellowships Dissertation Fellowship. Provides living expenses for women during their final year of dissertation writing.
Internal Grants:
- TENN Herbarium Student Research Awards. Projects must be herbarium-based, either using or vouchering herbarium specimens or analyzing herbarium specimen data.
- Breedlove, Dennis Awards. Awards can be used by undergraduate and graduate students applying to support botanically-based fieldwork.