Anthony Marin Recommendation Letter - Doe Fellowship

November 24, 2009 To: DOE Office of Science Graduate Fellowship Program Selection Committee I am writing this letter to recommend Anthony Marin for a DOE Office of Science Graduate Fellowship. I have known Anthony since 1992 when his father and I started working together at the DuPont Company. Since then, I have helped to guide his career into engineering, including recommending that he attend Virginia Tech and major in Mechanical Engineering. While pursuing his undergraduate degree, Anthony served five CO-OP terms at DuPont in the Kevlar® and Nomex® research groups and he did an absolutely outstanding job. In fact, in the last few assignments he performed, he was thought of as a degreed engineer. Anthony has a passion to work in research as his career objective, and I therefore highly recommend him for this Fellowship. When I retired from full time work at DuPont last year, I was a DuPont Fellow and thus qualified to express an opinion on Anthony’s potential as a future researcher in the sciences and engineering. I founded DuPont’s CO-OP program at the Richmond, Virginia facility and supervised more than fifty CO-OP students while at DuPont. I mention this because I have learned that practical experience is a great foundation for research personnel. I think that Anthony can leverage his undergraduate research experience at DuPont into doing superior original research in graduate school. Very few of the DOE Office of Science Graduate Fellowship applicants can possibly have this background, and thus they do not have Anthony’s high potential for success. Anthony is focused on achieving success in his graduate experience. He understands that making an original contribution in research is required and I am sure that he will succeed. I have advised many other students on their graduate programs and have followed their subsequent careers and I think Anthony has the potential to be among the best I have advised. I believe this because Anthony has the intensity to follow his goal of working in research - he could have taken a job after the BS degree, but rather chose to seek an advanced degree Anthony has worked well on teams with colleagues from all sorts of diverse and multidiscipline backgrounds. Very few people get this opportunity and have this experience at Anthony’s age. His has communicated his work and opinions in meetings and research reports. He has made presentations to professional engineering management and business personnel. I think as a result of these experiences he is far ahead of other students at this stage of their careers. But doing an advanced degree is ultimately about the quality of one’s research. Can Anthony make an original and unique contribution to the sciences and engineering worthy of being granted a DOE Graduate Fellow? All the candidates that you will consider have the basic credentials, but the differentiating factors are past work and future potential. Past work is based on experience, which Anthony has – how many

graduate students have worked for a major corporation with an outstanding record of success over a long period of time? Future potential is based on talent and desire, which Anthony has – he has demonstrated research capability at DuPont, even for an undergraduate; and he has that indefinable factor for always being successful at what he does. I would expect that his research would be noteworthy of new discovery and broadly recognized for its importance. Again, I recommend Anthony Marin for the DOE Office of Science Graduate Fellowship. Larry R. Marshall, Ph.D. DuPont Fellow, Retired Chairman and Co-Owner Complete Circle Solutions, Inc. 11318 Laurel Cove Lane Chesterfield, VA 23838