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Sam Watson (left) and Adel Elsohly were selected for prestigious Barry M. Goldwater Scholarships. |
Adel Elsohly and Sam Watson, both of Oxford, are students with the Sally McDonnell Barksdale Honors College, and have earned prestigious Barry M. Goldwater Scholarships.
“Adel and Sam have met an incredibly high standard, and more importantly, demonstrate the potential to achieve even more,” said Debra Young, assistant dean of the Sally McDonnell Barksdale Honors College. “To have two Goldwater scholars this year is a fine validation of the way our science faculty engages and supports talented students.”
The Goldwater scholarships are awarded annually to undergraduates who demonstrate a commitment to careers as research scientists. Out of 1,100 nominees nationwide, only 323 earned the award.
“Overall, I consider [receiving the Goldwater Scholarship] as a culmination of everything that I’ve been working toward while in college,” said Elsohly, a pharmaceutical sciences, mathematics and chemistry major who is planning a career in medicinal chemistry.
“[Elsohly] immediately made significant progress on a series of quantum chemistry computations to characterize several species that play an important role in the etching process for microelectronic devices such as computer processors,” said Gregory Tschumper, an assistant professor of chemistry and biochemistry. “More recently, Adel has moved onto another difficult project in which extremely accurate computational procedures are used to probe the details behind a special class of interactions between molecules that is responsible for phenomena such as the stacking of base pairs in the double-helix of DNA.”
Meanwhile, Watson, a physics, mathematics and classics major, eyes a mathematics professorship at a university and the opportunity to conduct research in algebra or combinatorics.
Watson and Tom Marshall, chair and professor of physics and astronomy, collaborated on a study of narrow bipolar pulses, electrical discharges from thunderstorms that are considered the most powerful natural radio sources on Earth. They worked on a mathematical model to account for the observed wave forms and have published their results.
“Sam and I used electromagnetic theory to model narrow bipolar pulses. His understanding of mathematics and his excellent ability to program in Mathematica, a programming language that he learned on this project, allowed him to make a very realistic model of these unusual discharges,” said Marshall.
Watson has also worked with mathematics chair Tristan Denley in the area of mathematical genetics, which may identify genes responsible for or involved in a variety of cancers and serious medical conditions.
“I feel like this recognition will open a lot of doors for me in the future,” Watson said. “I think the program does a lot to promote seriousness about research nationally.”