• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, January 11, 2010

Facebook may have been famously started by a college dropout, but that doesn't mean it isn't interested in helping those with higher academic aspirations.

To that end, the social network has launched a fellowship program that will pay tuition and fees for five Ph.D students for the academic year beginning in the fall of 2010, along with a $30,000 stipend and $5000, respectively, for travel expenses and a personal computer.

Facebook said it is looking for students at U.S. universities researching areas linked to social media including Internet economics, cloud computing, social computing, data mining, and machine learning.

"We believe that the academic community plays a central role in addressing many of our most challenging research questions, and we created this fellowship to extend our involvement and collaboration with the academic world," wrote Greg Badros, director of engineering at Facebook, in a blog post Friday.

He noted that the company has recently tackled technical problems such as efficient photo storage, distributed computation and "crowdsourced translations" as it strives to keep up with a rapidly growing user base of 350 million people worldwide. That's a far cry from the campus-based network CEO Mark Zuckerberg launched in 2003 with a group of fellow Harvard students before leaving school early to run Facebook full-time.

While the fellowship includes the opportunity to apply for a paid summer internship, Facebook spokesman Matt Hicks downplayed use of the program as a recruiting tool. "Our goal is collaborate with the academic community and build a strong relationship with them to make progress on the technical challenges we face, rather than to hire these fellows away from academia," he said.

Of course, that doesn't mean Facebook isn't looking for "the best and brightest," which may also include Ph.Ds. Candidates for a Facebook fellowship must be nominated by a faculty member and submit two letters of recommendation and other materials by the application deadline of Feb. 15. Non-U.S. citizens are also eligible for the program.