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Graduate student awarded coveted Gates Millennium Fellowship

By Brian Fitzgerald

The career of engineering graduate student Kimani Toussaint is advancing by quantum leaps and bounds. In the late 1990s he was a student in the College of Engineering's Late Entry Accelerated Program (LEAP), which is designed for those who want a master's degree in engineering but whose bachelor's degree is in a different subject.

After much hard work, Toussaint (ENG'99,'04) earned his master's in electrical engineering in 1999. He wanted to pursue a doctorate, but of course, Ph.D.s don't come cheap. However, Toussaint will now be able to jump some financial hurdles with a Gates Millennium Fellowship, which will cover his tuition for the next three to four years.

	Kimani Toussaint. Photo by Albert L'Etoile

The Gates Millennium Scholars Program, created two years ago with a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is administered by the United Negro College Fund, in partnership with the Hispanic Scholarship Fund and the American Indian College Fund. The scholarships and fellowships are targeted toward high-achieving students from low-income minority families. Toussaint's accomplishment was especially noteworthy because out of this year's 4,000 Gates Scholarships and Fellowships (chosen from 64,000 applicants), only 217 of them were awarded to graduate students.

Toussaint, whose mother is from Nigeria, majored in physics and African-American studies at the University of Pennsylvania. "One of my thermodynamics professors there was into fiber optics, and I got interested in it as well," he recalls. "When I was looking into graduate programs, I saw that Boston University was building this Photonics Center. After talking with that professor about the photonics field, I got pretty excited."

Photonics is the study of the practical application of light. In 1997, BU built the nine-floor, $80 million Photonics Center to help bridge the gap between basic research and practical application. Toussaint's concentration is in quantum optics, which involves the development of nonclassical sources of light that rely on the quantum nature of the electromagnetic field.

"As I was checking out colleges and universities, the LEAP program at BU also caught my eye," he says. Students in the LEAP program must complete undergraduate core engineering and science courses with a 3.0 GPA. "I had a background in physics, and although engineering is much different than physics, it wasn't that difficult. I matriculated into the regular master's program in a year and a half." His area of study was in optical data storage.

The Philadelphia native, who spent some of his childhood in Nigeria, always had an interest in science, but actually struggled with the subject at the University of Pennsylvania. "I wasn't as prepared as I should have been," he says, "but I got better at it as time went on. I was constantly learning, constantly refining. And I always had a vivid imagination, which I think goes hand in hand with science. The exploratory side of science is what gets me to the lab every day." The Photonics Center's Quantum Imaging Laboratory, where Toussaint does his research, exploits nonclassical light for the purposes of optical imaging, cryptography, and many other applications.

Toussaint's future in the field took off with the speed of light last September, when he discovered that he had passed his qualifying exams for the doctoral program in electrical engineering. Several days later, he received a letter notifying him of the Gates Millennium Fellowship. All in all, not a bad month for a graduate of an inner-city high school that had a less than stellar science curriculum.

Microsoft founder Bill Gates -- cofounder of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation -- says that the 20-year, $1 billion Gates Millennium Scholars Program is aimed at reducing the financial barriers to a college education for 20,000 minority students. "The best and brightest students shouldn't be denied access to higher education simply because they can't afford it," says Gates. "Melinda and I hope that this gift will not only benefit thousands of students, but also benefit America by empowering a diverse generation of leaders who otherwise might not have a chance."

23 February 2001
Boston University
Office of University Relations