A Kansas University graduate student has won a $90,000 fellowship from NASA to help design a new radar to detect changes in ice sheets.

Theresa Stumpf, a doctoral student in KU’s School of Engineering, was awarded a NASA Earth and Space Science Fellowship that will pay $90,000 over three years. Stumpf, who studies electrical engineering, conducts research at KU’s Center for Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets.

Researchers at CReSIS develop radars that scientists from around the world use to study the state of ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica.

During her fellowship, Stumpf will research a new type of radar that can penetrate ice sheets to gather data more widely and more clearly than the radars currently used by those scientists.

The radar could help researchers gather more information about the spot where ice sheets meet the bedrock below them, where the state of the ice can have a big effect on sea levels, Stumpf said in a KU release.