Tag: Barry Goldwater Scholarship

  • MIT Celebrates Three Scholars Honored with 2024-25 Goldwater Scholarships

    MIT Celebrates Three Scholars Honored with 2024-25 Goldwater Scholarships

    MIT students Ben Lou, Srinath Mahankali, and Kenta Suzuki have been awarded Barry Goldwater Scholarships for the 2024-25 academic year. They are among just 438 beneficiaries from throughout the country chosen based on academic merit from an estimated pool of over 5,000 college sophomores and juniors, with approximately 1,350 of them nominated by their academic institution to compete for the prize.

    Since 1989, the Barry Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation has awarded nearly 11,000 Goldwater scholarships to undergraduates who want to pursue research careers in natural sciences, mathematics, and engineering and have the potential to be leaders in their fields. Previous scholars have gone on to achieve an astonishing number of prominent postgraduate fellowships. Almost all, including the three MIT honorees, plan to pursue doctorates in their fields of study.

    Ben Lou

    Ben Lou, a third-year student originally from San Diego, California, studies physics and math with a minor in philosophy.

    “My research interests are scattered across different disciplines,” Lou said. “I want to draw from a wide range of topics in math and physics, finding novel connections between them, to push forward the frontier of knowledge.”

    Since January 2022, he has collaborated with Nergis Mavalvala, the dean of the School of Science, and Hudson Loughlin, a graduate student in the LIGO group, which studies gravitational wave detection. Lou collaborates with them to develop quantum measurement research and gain a deeper understanding of quantum gravity.

    “Ben has enormous intellectual horsepower and works with remarkable independence,” writes Mavalvala in her recommendation letter. “I have no doubt he has an outstanding career in physics ahead of him.”

    Lou, for his part, is grateful to Mavalvala and Loughlin, as well as all of his scientific mentors who have guided him through his research career. This includes MIT professors Alan Guth and Barton Zwiebach, who introduced him to quantum physics, as well as his first-year advisor, Richard Price; current advisor, Janet Conrad; Elijah Bodish and Roman Bezrukavnikov from the Department of Mathematics; and David W. Brown from the San Diego Math Circle.

    Lou’s future job aspirations include becoming a theoretical physics professor and studying the “fundamental aspects of reality” while also inspiring youngsters to love math and physics.

    In addition to his studies, Lou is presently the vice president of MIT’s Assistive Technology Club and is actively involved in fundraising for Spinal Muscular Atrophy research. In the future, he hopes to continue his philanthropic efforts and use his personal experience to advise an assistive technology startup.

    Srinath Mahankali

    Srinath Mahankali, a third-year student from New York City, studies computer science.

    Mahankali is an undergraduate researcher at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, having started in June 2022. Mahankali’s research focuses on robot training, and she collaborates with Pulkit Agrawal, an assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science and the head of the Improbable AI Lab. His current research focuses on training quadruped robots to walk efficiently and agents to interact in situations with limited feedback. But in the future, he wants to create robots that can perform physical tasks such as gymnastics.

    “The experience of discussing research with Srinath is similar to discussions with the best PhD students in my group,” adds Agrawal in his recommendation letter. “He is fearless, willing to take risks, persistent, creative, and gets things done.”

    Prior to attending MIT, Mahanakli was a 2021 Regeneron STS scholar, one of the oldest and most distinguished scholarships for math and science students. In 2020, he also took part in the MIT PRIMES program, where he studied objective functions in optimization problems alongside Yunan Yang, an assistant professor of mathematics at Cornell University.

    “I’m deeply grateful to all my research advisors for their invaluable mentorship and guidance,” adds Mahanakli, who also thanks PhD students Zhang-Wei Hong and Gabe Margolis, as well as Brandeis assistant professor of math, Promit Ghosal, and all of the PRIMES program organizers. “I’m also very grateful to all the members of the Improbable AI Lab for their support, encouragement, and willingness to help and discuss any questions I have,”

    Mahankali intends to pursue a PhD and eventually manage his own robots and artificial intelligence lab.

    Kenta Suzuki

    Kenta Suzuki is a third-year math major from Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, and Tokyo, Japan.

    Suzuki is currently working with mathematics professor Roman Bezrukavnikov on research at the confluence of number and representation theory, using geometric approaches to represent p-adic groups. Suzuki has previously collaborated with math academics Wei Zhang and Zhiwei Yun, with the latter prompting him to continue research in representation theory.

    In his recommendation letter, Yun says, “Kenta is the best undergraduate student that I have worked with in terms of raw talent, mathematical maturity, and research skills.”

    Suzuki was a Yau Science Award USA finalist in 2020, earning a gold in math, and an honorable mention from the Davidson Institute Fellows program in 2021. He also took part in the MIT PRIMES program in 2020. Suzuki credits his PRIMES mentor, Michael Zieve of the University of Michigan, with giving him his first taste of math research. In addition, he thanked all of his math mentors, including the organizers of the MIT Summer Program in Undergraduate Research.

    Suzuki plans to pursue a PhD in pure mathematics after graduating from MIT, continuing his research in representation theory and number theory, and eventually teaching at a research university.

    The Barry Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Program was created by the United States Congress in 1986 to honor Senator Barry Goldwater, a soldier and national leader who served the country for 56 years. Awardees get annual scholarships of up to $7,500 to help cover tuition, housing & board, fees, and books.

  • Brian Armijo Becomes First Student in Southwestern History to Win Goldwater Scholarship

    Brian Armijo Becomes First Student in Southwestern History to Win Goldwater Scholarship

    For the first time in Southwestern University’s distinguished history, a student has received the Barry Goldwater Scholarship. Brian Armijo ’25, a junior biochemistry and mathematics double major, has been awarded a distinguished, nationally competitive prize for students pursuing research careers in the natural sciences, mathematics, and engineering.

    “When I saw all the doors that this scholarship could open, I immediately thought it was something I have to apply for,” Armijo said. “I was familiar that it wasn’t something that a lot of people here at Southwestern apply for, so I thought I absolutely should go for it.”

    The award, established by the United States Congress in 1986 to honor Senator Barry Goldwater, helps ensuring that the country produces enough highly qualified workers in important STEM subjects.

    Armijo is now pursuing undergraduate research with Dr. Maha Zewail-Foote at Southwestern and Dr. Devleena Samanta at the University of Texas, whom he met through a National Science Foundation-funded internship in 2022. Last summer, he also collaborated with Dr. Julian West of Rice University in Houston.

    “The scholarship is really the signifier that Brian has great potential for a future career in research, which is fantastic.” – Alexandra Anderson, Senior Associate Director of the Center for Career & Professional Development

    “The Goldwater Scholarship committee expects the winners to have one or more published experiences,” Senior Associate Director of the Center for Career & Professional Development (CCPD) Alexandra Anderson stated. “That is the true winner here. Yes, there is money involved, but the scholarship truly demonstrates Brian’s potential for a future career in research, which is amazing.”

    Armijo, the first Southwestern student to receive a Goldwater Scholarship, knows the significance of this honor for the university’s future.

    “It makes me very excited for new researchers that are coming up through Southwestern because I can act as a source of advice and guidance for them,” he went on to say. “It’s really exciting to have a framework set up for not just our chemistry program, but all of our different STEM departments, because the application process can be overwhelming at first glance.”

    Armijo spent several months working with Anderson and the CCPD to write and build his application, beginning with the first step of selecting overarching themes and ending with the final changes.

    “[The CCPD] was really influential in getting my application tied together in as nice of a way as it was,” Armijo said. “I wouldn’t have been able to do it without corresponding with Alexandra.”

    “Southwestern has allowed me to get to a point where I’m confident in what I am going to do moving forward post undergraduate.” – Brian Armijo ’25

  • Goldwater Scholar Recipients: Two Students from Johns Hopkins University

    Goldwater Scholar Recipients: Two Students from Johns Hopkins University

    Johns Hopkins juniors Kyra Bowden and Grace Luettgen were recently granted the prestigious Barry Goldwater Scholarship.

    The program, named after the late Senator and Major General Barry Goldwater, helps college sophomores and juniors pursue research careers in engineering, mathematics, and natural sciences. Bowden and Luettgen are acknowledged for their contributions to biomedical engineering and biophysics, respectively.

    This year, the Goldwater Scholarship Foundation will assist 438 new scholars chosen from an applicant pool of over 5,000. Each scholar will get up to $7,500 per school year until two years have elapsed or the student has graduated. Schools can suggest up to four applicants per year.

    Kyra Bowden

    Biomedical Engineering

    Bowden hopes to employ machine learning and image analysis to investigate disease and injuries and improve results for orthopedic patients. Since spring 2022, Bowden has collaborated with Seth Blackshaw and Jonathan Ling to analyze differential exon inclusion in proteins using ASCOT, a database of alternative splicing events drawn from hundreds of thousands of mouse and human RNA sequencing datasets. He also developed Python scripts to use the AlphaFold v2.0 AI platform to model how ASCOT-identified splicing events impact protein structure and function. Bowden’s work has been published in prestigious journals such as Nature Communications and Nature Medicine, and he is the first author of a poster at the Society for Neuroscience. She also got a grant from the Leong Summer Research Fund and will spend the summer in Switzerland as part of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne Excellence Research Internship Programme. Outside of the lab, Bowden has been a resident adviser since her sophomore year and is an official in the Johns Hopkins Biomedical Engineering Society and SHARE (Supporting Hospitals Abroad with Resources and Equipment). She helps with Thread, the JHU Tutorial Project, and a local health care clinic.

    Grace Luettgen

    Physics, Biophysics

    Luettgen’s goal is to create signaling proteins that regulate interactions between the immune system and sick cells. Luettgen has been working in Brian Camley’s lab since the spring of her freshman year. Her initial project focused on constructing a computer model to understand probable mechanisms of cell cluster migration, which is critical for tissue growth, wound healing, and cancer metastasis. She is presently focusing on chronic lymphocytic leukemia, utilizing computational modeling to better understand how malignant lymphocytes enter lymph nodes by detecting changes in chemical cues. She was the first author of a recent presentation on this leukemia research at the American Physical Society, and she received an ASPIRE grant to support it. Luettgen has also worked with Aleksandrina Goeva and Miri Adler at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard on gene control of cerebellar neurons and communication between molecular layer interneurons (MLIs) and Purkinje layer interneurons (PLIs). Outside of the lab and academic work for her two majors, Luettgen is an organizer for the JHU Tutorial Project and a volunteer with SHARE and Baltimore First, where she helps older Baltimore residents with technology.