2007 Goldwater Finalists
The 2007 Barry M. Goldwater Scholars were selected on the basis of academic merit from a field of 1,110 mathematics, science, and engineering students who were nominated by the faculties of colleges and universities nationwide. 317 scholarships were awarded for the 2007-2008 academic year to undergraduate sophomores and juniors from the United States. The one- and two-year scholarships will cover the cost of tuition, fees, books, and room and board up to a maximum of $7,500 per year.
One hundred seventy-four of the Scholars are men, 143 are women, and virtually all intend to obtain a Ph.D. as their degree objective. Twenty-eight Scholars are mathematics majors, 223 are science and related majors, 54 are majoring in engineering, and 12 are computer science majors. Many of the Scholars have dual majors in a variety of mathematics, science, engineering, and computer disciplines.
In its nineteen-year history, the Foundation has awarded 5,202 scholarships worth approximately fifty-one million dollars. The Trustees plan to award about three hundred scholarships for the 2008-2009 academic year.
| |  Goldwaters, from left to right: Pavan Vaswani, Jennifer (Jenne) Driggers, Julia Schwartz, and Sam Burden. |
| Sam Burden, Goldwater Honorable Mention Sam Burden Bio coming soon. Jennifer Driggers, Goldwater Scholar Jennifer (Jenne) Driggers is a Physics major with plans to help continue the search for gravitational waves. She intends to earn a Ph.D. studying gravitational wave physics, and then become a professor of physics. Jenne began researching the Condensed Matter Casimir Effect with Dr. Gerald Seidler of UW’s Physics Department her freshman year, and has continued that project throughout her undergraduate career, which included a summer funded by the NASA Space Grant Consortium’s Summer Undergraduate Research Program. Jenne received a Mary Gates Research Training Grant for her work with Dr. Seidler. Jenne also worked with Drs. Alan Weinstein and Rana Adhikari of the California Institute of Technology on the NSF-funded Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) project. Jenne will be working this coming summer with Dr. Gerald Gabrielse of Harvard studying antihydrogen at CERN, the world's largest particle physics laboratory situated in Switzerland. When not in classes or in the lab, Jenne enjoys playing squash, rock climbing and reading. She is also a member of the University Honors Program. Julia Schwartz, Goldwater Scholar Julia Schwartz is a computer science major and is currently interested in human-computer interaction. Her most recent research endeavors were developing a text-insertion interface for the Classroom Presenter 3.0 http://www.cs.washington.edu/education/dl/presenter/. This research work is developing a system to view the PanLingual Image Search website in many languages http://knowitall-3.cs.washington.edu/panimages . Julia loves teaching, and this is her second quarter as a TA for CSE 143 (the second introductory computer science course). She hopes to become a professor at a university where she can do what she loves, and share her passion for computer science with others. Julia is an early entrance student who has earned several accolades, most notably the CSE Award for Excellence. She was awarded the Freshman Medal that is given to the student with the highest academic standing. She is also a member of Phi Beta Kappa. Julia is an avid juggler, and she is the founder of the Jugglers at UW a student club. She can juggle 6 balls and 5 clubs. http://students.washington.edu/uwjuggle. She also loves the outdoors, especially skiing. When the ski season is over, Julia likes to surf, hike, climb, do karate (more recently yoga), and read. Pavan Vaswani, Goldwater Scholar Pavan Vaswani is a Computer Science and Biochemistry major, interested in developing medical technologies as a career. He plans to obtain a Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering and attend medical school through an M.D./Ph.D. program, ideally through the NIH-Oxford-Cambridge partnership program. Pavan began research at the UW working with Dr. Kenichi Matsuoka in the Earth and Space Sciences Department through the Summer Undergraduate Research Program, working to develop two systems for radar profiling of glacial ice. He is now working with Dr. Pierre D. Mourad in neurological surgery and the applied physics lab to develop a device to measure intracranial pressure non-invasively using vibroacoustography, a high intensity focused ultrasound method. His work on this project has been generously supported by Washington NASA Space Grant Summer Undergraduate Research Program, the Mary Gates Endowment, and a Research Fellowship for Advanced Undergraduates. In what remains of his time, Pavan enjoys drawing, reading, attempting to teach himself to cook, and collecting coins. He also enjoys creative writing, reading, and spending time with his cat. |