Goldwater Foundation Honors Four Duke Undergraduates
Media contact: Kendall Morgan, (919) 684-2850
April 1, 2008
Durham, NC -- The Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation has announced the winners of the 2008 Goldwater Scholarships in Science, Mathematics and Engineering. Three Duke juniors are among the recipients of this national award, which provides up to $7500 toward annual tuition and expenses.
Nicholas Patrick, Mark Hallen and Daniel Roberts are Duke's newest Goldwater Scholars, and Stephen DeVience, also a junior, received an honorable mention. Each of these students is creating and applying strong mathematical and computational models to solve problems in various scientific disciplines.
Patrick and DeVience were both 2007 summer fellows performing research in the Duke Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy (IGSP) and both are conducting the research now honored in IGSP-associated laboratories.
In collaboration with Bruce Donald, a professor of computer science and IGSP member, Patrick is devising and refining computational methods for nuclear magnetic resonance analysis of protein structure.
"These experiments naturally have applications to biological research and structure-based drug design," said Patrick, who is a computer science major. After graduation, he plans to pursue a doctoral degree in computational biology and conduct research as a university professor or as a scientist in a biotechnology company.
In the laboratory of cell biologist Sharon Endow, Hallen is applying novel techniques to extend analyses of experimental data on protein function to in vivo rather than in vitro environments.
“Methods to study these problems in vivo are likely to be instrumental in the future development of our understanding of biology, as well as medicine, biotechnology and other applications that may be developed," said Hallen, a double major in chemistry and math who anticipates pursuing a doctoral degree in the field of mathematical modeling.
Daniel Roberts, a double major in electrical and computer engineering and physics, is exploring practical innovations for transformation optics and metamaterials, including invisibility cloaks and electromagnetic concentrators, in the laboratory of David Smith, a professor of electrical and computer engineering. He plans to attend graduate school in physics and to design and implement electromagnetic devices with commercial applications.
Biomedical engineering and chemistry major Stephen DeVience has developed and refined models of mammalian X chromosome behavior under the mentorship of IGSP Director Huntington Willard and Lingchong You, an IGSP investigator in the department of biomedical engineering.
"X chromosome inactivation is a process occurring in female mammalian cells by which only one of [two] X chromosomes is selected to actively transcribe genes," DeVience explained. "Numerous experiments over the past four decades have been unable to reveal how such a selection takes place."
Each year, colleges and universities are invited to nominate up to four sophomores or juniors to the Goldwater Foundation. Since the national program was initiated in 1988, a total of 67 Duke students have been named Goldwater Scholars. The Foundation's announcement and list of scholars can be found at http://www.act.org/goldwater.