The Department of Defense Science, Mathematics, and Research for Transformation Program is a scholarship-for- service program that combines educational and workforce development opportunities for individuals seeking a degree in 1 of 24 STEM disciplines. The program funds students at the undergraduate, masters, and doctoral levels. In return, scholars are required to complete a one to one service commitment with their sponsoring facility. 

The DOD SMART program is an important element of NGA’s efforts to attract, recruit and educate highly skilled and diverse personnel interested in producing geospatial intelligence in support of U.S. decision makers, military servicemembers, and first responders. Grant recipients are engaged in groundbreaking research in STEM within the DOD. 

Richard Sayanagi, a current NGA Research and Development, DOD SMART Scholar, was selected to participate in last summer’s inaugural SMART International Internship cohort. He attended The Alan Turing Institute, in London, England with a focus on AI Research in Defense for the summer 2024 internship program. This program offers scholar’s opportunities to consider their research on a national and global scale to understand scientific cooperation between the U.S. and other countries in emerging technology fields.

“As a mathematician heading into a career in national security, I am honored to be able to spend a summer at the institute that bears the name of one of my personal heroes,” said Sayanagi before his internship. “I am excited to work with and learn from the best international researchers in the field of data science and artificial intelligence to apply my mathematical training. I hope to bring back cutting-edge research expertise to my future colleagues at NGA.”

NGA also employs doctoral scholars who have applied and been awarded The DOD SMART SEED Grant—a subprogram that financially supports the establishment of foundational research and engineering efforts to develop future technical subject matter experts within the DOD. Project proposals were selected by a panel of science and technology experts from multiple DOD components as advancing research in four areas critical to national defense—Advanced Computing & Software, Integrated Sensing & Cyber, Space Technology, and Trusted Artificial Intelligence & Autonomy.

Christian O. Díaz Cáez, who has a doctorate in electrical engineering from Howard University, was awarded, in fiscal year 2023, for his research in computational electromagnetics focusing on areas such as the modeling and simulation of electromagnetic scattering, radiation, and the evaluation of radar cross-section. 

“Being recognized with the DOD SMART SEED Grant is a testament to the value of our endeavors in computational electromagnetics,” said Díaz Cáez, Ph.D. “This support not only amplifies the significance of our work, but also paves the way for us to enhance NGA's capabilities through cutting-edge electromagnetic simulations.” 

In 2024, The SEED Grant Program awarded NGA $250k dollars to fund research in multimodal computer vision models for satellite imagery for the next two years. Katherine Wall, who holds a doctorate in biostatistics from the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, was announced as the fiscal year 2024 SEED grant recipient and her research will include the implementation of a novel multimodal neural network architecture for satellite imagery to enhance performance in automatic object segmentation.

The SMART Scholarship-for-Service Program closes applications for this year on December 6, 2024. If you have application or program questions, please email smart@smartscholarship.org with questions. To access your application, visit: https://www.smartscholarship.org/apply.