Four CU undergraduates win prestigious Goldwater scholarships

By David Brand

For the first time, all four of Cornell University's nominees to the national competition for the Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship have won the the prestigious award. The four winners are: juniors David L. Kaplan, engineering; David Liben-Nowell, arts and sciences; and David C. Roberts, engineering; and sophomore Alexander V. Rau, arts and sciences.

Cornell has now garnered 14 Goldwater awards since 1992. In each of the past two years the university has had three Goldwater recipients. One winner went on to win a Rhodes scholarship, and another won a Marshall scholarship.

Comments Yervant Terzian, chairman of the astronomy department: "We are enormously proud of the achievements of our Cornell undergraduate students. It makes me feel I want to work harder for them."

This year's 316 Goldwater scholars are sophomores and juniors selected on the basis of academic merit from a field of 1,186 mathematics, science and engineering students nationwide. Of the scholars, 183 are men; 133 are women.

The Goldwater scholarships honor former U.S. Sen. Barry M. Goldwater and encourage outstanding students to pursue careers in the fields of mathematics, the natural sciences and engineering. The scholarships, the major undergraduate awards of their type in these fields, cover the cost of tuition, fees, books, and room and board up to a maximum of $7,500 a year. The Goldwater Foundation is a federally endowed agency now in its 10th year.

The four Cornell winners:

·David Kaplan's major is applied and engineering physics. His goal is to earn his doctorate in astronomy and to teach at the university level. He is a Cornell National Scholar. He attended Swampscott High School in Swampscott, Mass. His research projects include a pulsar search with single pulse data; control software for a pulsar search machine; and deriving a pulsar population model for pulsar candidates detected while at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, findings that he presented at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

·David Liben-Nowell's major is computer science and philosophy. His goal is to earn his doctorate in computer science and to teach and do research at the university level. He is a Cornell National Scholar. He attended State College Area High School, State College, Pa. Currently he is working with Jon Kleinberg, Cornell assistant professor of computer sciences, on a computational biology computer model for determining the relationship between two species' genomes.

·David Roberts' major is applied physics. His goal is to do research in challenging problems in the natural sciences. He is an All-American Scholar. He attended Grissom High School, Huntsville, Ala. Since August 1997 he has been a research assistant to Donald Turcotte, the M.M. Upson Professor of Engineering, on a project involving fractal statistical techniques. He has determined that the craters on Venus are spatially random, proving that the Venusian surface is no longer active.

· Alexander Rau's major is physics. His goal is to earn his doctorate in physics or geology and to do research in a university or national laboratory. He is both a Dean's Scholar and a College Scholar. He attended Baton Rouge Magnet High School, Baton Rouge, La. Since August 1997, he has been research assistant to Charles Williamson, Cornell associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, on a project looking at the behavior of a tethered sphere in a moving fluid.