Ten graduate students were recently awarded more than $700 in grant money from the Graduate Student Senate for Spring 2011 research, with one student receiving the full amount possible.

The largest grant in 2010 was $224.82, according to Senate records. The maximum grant allotment was changed from $500 to $750 a few years ago, Senate chairman Derrell Cox said.

After the change, few students received it because of the increasing number of applicants and the limited funding, Cox said.

“The GSS Ways and Means Committee in conjunction with the GSS Executive Committee agreed that the grant awards should recognize the very best applicants with the maximum grant award,” anthropology graduate student Cox said in an email.

The current policy is to award the top 10 applicants with the maximum award, and allocate the remaining funds to the rest of the applicants that meet the criteria, Cox said.

Physics and astronomy graduate student Hemantha Maddumage was the only student to receive the maximum $750.

Maddumage’s research involves the study of dark matter.

“The main goal of our work is to constrain dark energy using observational data already available,” Maddumage said.

Dark energy is a concept introduced to explain the observed acceleration of the expansion of the universe, Maddumage said.

Maddumage used his funding to attend Berkeley Center for Cosmological Physics international conference in Mexico in January and was able to discuss improvements to his research.

Industrial engineering graduate student Manasi Kharude received a $741.67 grant for his research into rest periods intended to relieve mental fatigue for air-traffic controllers.

Kharude said he is comparing breaks spent on social networking sites to breaks involving physical activity to test their effectiveness.

Kharude said his research is important to the Federal Aviation Administration due to the high rates of mental fatigue in the field of air-traffic control.

“I have had people from the FAA help me out with the experimental design and one of them will be a member of thesis committee,” Kharude said.

Part of the reason the project requires the grant is to provide incentive to the subjects because of the mental fatigue involved with the tests, Kharude said.

Apart from the 10 students who received between $736.71 and $750, no other student was awarded above $550.