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CORVALLIS - An Oregon State University graduate student has received a prestigious $15,000 fellowship that will send him to Washington, D.C. to study the history of major U.S. national laboratories - especially those relating to energy.

D. Erik Ellis, a master's student in the Program for the History of Science in the OSU Department of History, began his eight-month fellowship this month. He will use the Glenn T. Seaborg Fellowship in Nuclear History to study the development of national laboratories founded by the Atomic Energy Commission.

Ellis will use the fellowship to investigate important archival records involving the emergence and governance of major U.S. national laboratories, including Hanford. His research will aid F.G. Gosling, chief historian of the U.S. Department of Energy, who is writing a comprehensive history of the National Laboratory system.

A 1994 graduate of Walla Walla College, Ellis has been enrolled in graduate studies at OSU since 1998. His graduate thesis focuses on the relationship between scientists and the federal government during the early Cold War.