Each year the Link Foundation awards up to five fellowships to qualified doctoral students in academic institutions for research in advanced simulation and training. The grants, totally $26,000 each, are to support students while they complete their dissertation research.
This program, in place since 1990, has awarded fellowships—approximately $1.3 million worth—to qualifying doctoral students studying in the simulation and training field at U.S. and Canadian universities. No limitations have been placed on citizenship.
Edwin Link's most famous invention was a ground-based simulator used for training aircraft pilots. This fellowship continues to support research in the field of flight training, but its scope has been expanded to a variety of non-aviation applications, some of which are listed below. The research proposed in these applications must still embody the objective and characteristics found in the original flight training simulator; i.e., the training and preparation of individuals to perform in complex, interactive, real-time environments. Thus the emphasis must continue to be on training rather than education, and on simulation for training purposes rather than for design-development or product-research purposes.
Applications that require the training of operators, and could benefit from new and/or improved simulation techniques, include:
“"The Link Fellowship provided an unparalleled opportunity to develop a parallel simulation which I'd been 'dreaming about' for several years. I am now at the point where I am generating papers and new modeling techniques based on this research."” —
