The three-year grant will fund the creation of The Xerox Foundation Fellowship Program at MIT's School of Engineering and support multiple master's and doctoral degree candidates annually. The creation of this fellowship program is part of Xerox's ongoing support of open innovation and collaborative research worldwide. It is in addition to The Xerox Foundation's long-standing annual $13 million investment in support of educational and nonprofit initiatives at a variety of universities and organizations.

"The Xerox Fellows program will lead to the creation of more top-notch research projects, strengthen our researchers' relationships with several world-class MIT professors, and enable us to attract bright students to come work in our research laboratories worldwide," said Sophie Vandebroek, chief technology officer and president of the Xerox Innovation Group. "It will also help MIT develop future researchers from groups that have been traditionally underrepresented in engineering."

"This fellowship program will offer important support for talented master's and doctoral degree candidates," said Subra Suresh, Dean of MIT's School of Engineering. "We look forward to strengthening and continuing to build intellectual links between MIT students and faculty and the Xerox research community."

The Xerox Fellows will focus on the following research areas:

• Green Processes and Technologies - Research will focus on understanding environmental impacts over the entire product lifecycle, from raw materials to use by customers and disposal, and on making products and services more environmentally friendly.
  
• Imaging and Smart Documents - Research will range from the recognition and enhancement of image content to smart document applications such as document summarization, natural language generation and machine translation.
  
• Nanotechnology and Microelectromechanical Systems (MEMS) - Research includes micro/nanotechnology projects such as nanostructured materials, microfluidic devices, nanocomposites, microscale heat transfer, and nanomanufacturing in addition to novel 3D polymers and a range of electronic, photonic and magnetic materials, all of which pose exciting possibilities for new devices and applications.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology
MIT is one of the world's preeminent research universities, dedicated to advancing knowledge and educating students in science, technology, management, and other areas of scholarship that will best serve the nation and the world in the 21st century. The Institute has more than 900 faculty and 10,000 undergraduate and graduate students, organized into five Schools: Architecture and Planning, Engineering, Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences; Management; and Science.