Media contact: Noelle Lemoine, communications assistant; tele: (413) 597-4277; email: [email protected]
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., May 8, 2015—The National Science Foundation (NSF) has announced the award of research fellowships to 9 Williams College students and alumni and honorable mentions to 12. The fellowships support graduate study in the sciences.
The Williams fellowship recipients are Chelsey Barrios ’12, who studies psychology at the University of Maryland; Allen Davis ’14, who studies physics and astronomy at Yale University; Jennifer Gossels ’13, who studies computer science at Princeton University; Sa-kiera Hudson ’11, who studies psychology at Harvard University; Christina Knapp ’13, who studies physics and astronomy at the University of California Santa Barbara; Alexander LaTourrette ’14, who studies psychology at Northwestern University; Gabriel Lewis ’13, who studies geosciences at Dartmouth College; Alice Sady ’13, who studies physics and astronomy at Johns Hopkins University; and Carrie Tribble ’13, who will study biology at the University of California, Berkeley.
Honorable mentions went to Ilya Amburg ’14, Gordon Bauer ’14, Joel Clemmer ’12, Timothy Durham ’09, Sarah Guillot ’13, Natalia Loewen ’12, Alexander Rich ’13, Nathan Schine ’13, Daniel Seita ’14, and Effua Sosoo ’13.
Two current seniors, Julia Cline and Samantha Petti, also received honorable mentions. Cline will attend a Ph.D. program in physics at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Petti plans to pursue a Ph.D. in algorithms, combinatorics, and optimization at Georgia Tech.
Knapp, who studied physics at Williams, will use the fellowship to study topological phases of matter. In particular, she will look at what changes occur when the fact that particles move at a finite speed is taken into account. She says she’s grateful for the freedom the award provides. The guaranteed funding from the fellowship will allow her to pursue outreach programs such as UCSB’s Women in Physics group and the Physics circus, a group of students who volunteer at local elementary school science nights.
Sady, who also was a physics major, will use the fellowship for Ph.D. work on a search for new particles and an update for code that simulates parts of the CMS detector. Sady says she developed her passion for physics during her junior year spent abroad in Boston University’s Geneva Physics Program in Switzerland. “I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to get a prestigious fellowship like the NSF because of my performance in my first years at Williams,” says Sady, who says that she felt unprepared for the academic rigor of college and struggled in her first two years here. “I hope it gives courage to other students who are struggling; I hope it makes them realize that it really comes down to hard work and that the results may not be apparent…that the day will come when they will look back and realize how far they’ve come and just how far they can go,” she says.
The NSF, an independent federal agency, was founded in 1950 to further U.S. leadership in the sciences, and it has supported graduate research since its inception. It awards more than 1,000 research fellowships each year.
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Founded in 1793, Williams College is the second-oldest institution of higher learning in Massachusetts. The college’s 2,000 students are taught by a faculty noted for the quality of their teaching and research, and the achievement of academic goals includes active participation of students with faculty in their research. Students’ educational experience is enriched by the residential campus environment in Williamstown, Mass., which provides a host of opportunities for interaction with one another and with faculty beyond the classroom. Admission decisions on U.S. applicants are made regardless of a student’s financial ability, and the college provides grants and other assistance to meet the demonstrated needs of all who are admitted.
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Published May 8, 2015
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