AME Graduate Student in First Class of Herbold Fellows

Bob Herbold, former chief operating officer of Microsoft Corp., and Patricia Herbold, who served as a U.S. ambassador to Singapore, started the Herbold Foundation in 2002 to provide college scholarships to students across the United States studying STEM subjects. This year, they are sponsoring the inaugural class of University of Arizona Herbold Fellows. The five graduate student fellows will each receive $10,000 for their work applying computer science and data sciences to a wide range of subjects.

Mechanical engineering graduate student Ethan Bolze, who majored in mechanical engineering and minored in aerospace engineering for his UA undergraduate studies, is one of the fellows. Bolze headed to work at Honeywell when he finished his bachelor’s degree in 2019, but after a year in industry, he was ready to return to higher education. He is returning to AME to investigate how aircraft interact with high-speed flow. His research will bridge aerodynamics and solid mechanics by producing large, highly resolved experimental and computational data sets that require advanced data analysis to extract the core physics of the interactions.

“It’s a really great marriage between what the university has to offer with this fellowship, my interests, and what the department wants to do,” Bolze said. “For someone to be kind enough to put forward this fund is truly a gift, and I’m extremely grateful, because without that I wouldn’t be going back this fall. I would likely have worked for a couple more years and saved up to go back.”