The AGMA Foundation Board of Trustees is pleased to announce the recipients of its 2020 Scholarship Awards. Each fall, the Foundation awards $5,000 scholarships at the Undergraduate/Graduate levels, and scholarships of up to $2,500 at the Associate/Technical school levels. The scholarship program delivers employees directly to the gear industry with a full 87% of graduated scholarship recipients now employed in the gear/power transmission field.

“The Foundation Board faced tough choices this year,” said Dean Burrows, president and CEO of Gear Motions and chairman of the AGMA Foundation Board of Trustees. “In a typical year, the Foundation will award 10 or more scholarships. This year the Foundation received 29 excellent applicants, that is a record number, but was forced by financial constraints to reduce the number of scholarships to eight.”

The foundation stopped their broad fundraising in 2017 to conduct a comprehensive strategic planning process. 

“Two years into a successful strategic plan, the Foundation planned to kickoff a major fundraising campaign at the 2020 AGMA/ABMA Annual Meeting,” continued Burrows. “Covid-19 canceled the meeting and while the major campaign is on hold, the Foundation will conduct smaller scale fundraising this fall to raise the funds needed to grant scholarships in 2021.”

The 2020 AGMA Foundation Scholarship Recipients with their school and company affiliations are:

Undergraduate Scholarship Recipients

Joshua Biddle, Indiana University – Purdue University Indianapolis, Allison Transmission

Mitch McDermaid, Western Michigan University, Eaton Corporation

Jared Minski, Penn State University Erie, Ameridrives a subsidiary of Altra Industrial Motion

Alexander Minton, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati Gearing Systems

Graduate Scholarship Recipients

David Ajoku, Carnegie Mellon University, Tesla

Abolfazl Hosseinpour, Univ. of North Carolina at Charlotte, Teaching Assistant

Connor Wilson, Purdue University, Linimar-McLaren Engineering

Kevin Qiu, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, Tesla and Trexo Robotics

The 2020 winner of the Linda and Bipin Doshi Scholarship Award is Connor Wilson of Purdue University. The Doshis, formerly of Schafer Industries, generously established an endowment to fund a scholarship for a top AGMA Foundation scholarship applicant.