Three University of Colorado at Boulder students have won a prestigious national scholarship for excellence in math, science and engineering.
Ashley Moore, Kelsi Singer and Amy Reppert were named Goldwater Scholars and will receive up to $7,500 for educational expenses next year. All three students are juniors who expect to graduate in May 2006.
"I think it's notable that our three scholarship winners are women, in the sense that it isn't out of the ordinary here at CU-Boulder," said Anne Dougherty, associate chair of applied mathematics and CU-Boulder's Goldwater faculty representative. "Many of our students, both men and women, excel in technical fields."
The three women are among 320 members of the 2005 class of Goldwater Scholars, selected on the basis of academic merit from a field of 1,091 mathematics, science and engineering students nominated by college faculties nationwide. One hundred sixty-five of the scholars are men and 155 are women.
Moore is an applied math and aerospace engineering double major with several research interests. In applied math, she works with Professor Keith Julien studying numerical solutions to nonlinear partial differential equations. Eventually, they will study the equations that describe Bose-Einstein Condensation, a phenomenon discovered by Nobel Prize winning CU-Boulder professors Carl Wieman and Eric Cornell.
Moore also is working on NASA-sponsored research in the aerospace engineering department's structural dynamics and control lab, under the direction of Professor Lee Peterson. Moore has done computer simulations and design of test hardware and new designs for the development of a special telescope. She also worked on the structural design of some of the telescope's components.
After a summer 2005 internship at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and her senior year at CU-Boulder, Moore plans to earn a doctorate and would like to work at NASA or in academia researching spacecraft design.
Among other scholarships, Moore has also won a Colorado Regents Scholarship and a $10,000 Astronaut Scholarship.
Singer is an astrophysics major and has been studying this semester at the Australian Centre for Astrobiology at Macquarie University in Sydney. Her research there includes inquiry into the effects of the moon on early earth. She has been both a Norlin Scholar and a member of the Undergraduate Academy since 2002.
Her research with Professor Alan Kiplinger has involved observing, cataloging and analyzing solar activity, particularly solar flares.
Singer plans to continue in astrophysics research with an emphasis on our own solar system. She is especially interested in solar physics and astrobiology, and hopes to have a career in research or academia.
Reppert, a molecular, cellular and developmental biology major and Dean's Scholar since 2002, has worked in Professor Kathy Rowlen's laboratory on the FluChip project. Funded by the National Institutes of Health, the project aims to develop a portable tool for the rapid identification of influenza A.
She plans to pursue a doctoral/medical degree specifically focusing on medical research in the field of microbiology with an emphasis in virology. In particular, Reppert wants to examine how research in virology intersects with research in infectious disease and, in turn, with infectious disease control in the United States and globally.
The Goldwater Foundation is a federally endowed agency established in 1986 in honor of Sen. Barry M. Goldwater, who served the United States as a soldier and statesman for 56 years. The program was designed to foster and encourage outstanding students to pursue careers in the fields of mathematics, the natural sciences and engineering. The Goldwater Scholarship is the premier undergraduate award of its type in these fields.
Goldwater Scholars have garnered the attention of prestigious post-graduate fellowship programs. Recent Goldwater Scholars have been awarded 58 Rhodes Scholarships, 72 Marshall Awards - including six of the 40 awarded in the United States in 2005 -- and numerous other distinguished fellowships.
For more information on the Goldwater program, visit http://www.act.org/goldwater.