$1M Gift Expands Support for Graduate Students in Geographical Sciences
In the hopes of helping even more graduate students of the Department of Geographical Sciences (GEOG), Jingli Yang ’95 and her husband, Peter Li, made a $1 million gift to establish the Dr. Jingli Yang and Dr. Peter Li Endowed Distinguished Fellowship in Geographical Sciences.
Yang is a longtime supporter of the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences, and previously served on its Board of Visitors; she is now serving on the University of Maryland College Park Foundation’s Board of Trustees.
Yang, who earned her Ph.D. from the department, and Li previously established the Dr. Jingli Yang and Dr. Peter Li Graduate Support Endowment Fund, which provides graduate students interested in remote sensing and geographic information systems with merit-based graduate summer research support—support that Yang knows from firsthand experience is so important to aspiring researchers.
“When I first went to Maryland, I was a research assistant, so my professor’s grants paid for me to do research. Later, I became a teaching assistant, and teaching assistants are supported eight or nine months out of the year—summer is not included,” Yang said. “If graduate students don’t have summer support, then they have to find other ways of getting it, either by finding a summer job, or other opportunities supporting professors’ research projects, and that takes time and energy away for their own research.”
Yang was ultimately able to support herself during her summers as a graduate student, despite the additional obstacles she faced as an international student; her visa only allowed her to pursue work opportunities on campus, not off. But she and Li—who together co-founded Earth Resources Technology (ERT), a company with more than 30 years of experience offering space and Earth science, enterprise engineering, and mission operation solutions to the federal government—have felt called to make things easier for graduate students who are pursuing a similar path, in summer, and now anytime of the year.
Via their latest gift, Yang and Li’s impact on GEOG graduate students will expand further, as the Dr. Jingli Yang and Dr. Peter Li Endowed Distinguished Fellowship in Geographical Sciences will provide awards of at least $5,000 to two to four students each year, to be used to offset summer expenses as well as tuition and research-related costs, such as acquiring data, conducting fieldwork, purchasing specialized equipment, and traveling to conferences to present research findings.
Yang feels that it is her responsibility to support students in GEOG in particular, given the impact that its professors had on her career. Professor Emeritus Stephen Prince helped Yang secure a NASA Global Change Fellowship that supported her during her time as a student. A seminar on how to present your research, led by Professor Emeritus John Townshend, taught Yang how to communicate her work clearly and succinctly, teaching her lessons that served her well over the years when talking to potential customers.
Yang also credits UMD with playing a part in people taking her seriously.
“Whenever I would go to talk to NASA/NOAA customers, they would say, ‘Wow, the University of Maryland is a great university,’ and ‘the Department of Geographical Sciences does great work.’ They could have thought ‘she’s not American’ or ‘she’s a woman’ and brushed me aside, but I never felt that way, and I think that’s partly because of the reputation of the university, the department, and the Ph.D. degree,” she said. “I feel indebted to the Department of Geographical Sciences, so I want to do anything I can to help.”
Published on Fri, Nov 21, 2025 - 12:01PM