The Goldwater Scholarship, established by Congress in 1986 to honor Senator Barry Goldwater (1909-1998), supports undergraduate sophomores and juniors who show promise in the natural sciences, engineering, and math. It provides up to $7,500 per year toward the cost of tuition, room and board, fees, and books.
Career goals: To obtain an MD/PhD and conduct biochemical research on antibiotic resistance and translate findings into clinical practice.
An influential experience: “My first research experience, conducting two independent projects with Daniel Weisdorf, MD, at the University of Minnesota, was pivotal in shaping my desire for a research career. Dr. Weisdorf took me on as a mentee the summer after my freshman year of high school. I conducted a data abstraction and analysis-based study on the use of potentially inappropriate medications for older adults in patients undergoing bone marrow transplants. The following summer, I continued as a research volunteer on the project, and later, through my high school’s Advanced Science Research class, I worked with Dr. Weisdorf again, investigating opioid and benzodiazepine use in this same population before and after a 2016 FDA warning against their co-prescription in older adults. These experiences sparked my passion for research, and the idea of gathering data to answer a research question that will later provide tangible improvements to health.”
Career goals: To obtain a PhD in relativistic astrophysics and pursue research using computational techniques that build models of, for example, neutron stars and black holes, to study scenarios involving strong gravitational fields.
An influential experience: “After living in rural China for seven years, then in never-sleeping New York City, I found myself uprooted and thrust into rural life again in south-central Pennsylvania. A fascination with the night sky developed with this drastic change at the age of ten. For my eleventh birthday that July, I wanted nothing more than to see the Perseids light up the sky. I begged my father to take me. That night, in the state park near our house, above the warm blanket that smelled like home-cooked Chinese food and under the cold blanket of the night sky, I saw the Perseids and the Milky Way for the first time. It was also the first time I experienced the tingling of my fingertips as I thought about how much I didn’t know about the universe I lived in. I grew conscious of my own curiosity. And more importantly, my desire to find out the unknowns of the universe through science.”
Career goals: To obtain a PhD in biomechanics and pursue research that combines biology, math, and physics to study organisms and their environments.
An influential experience: “In my senior year of high school, I read a paper that modeled the impact of oysters on water quality by numerically solving the Navier-Stokes equations. After going down a Wikipedia rabbit hole, I realized the obvious; this was math—math beyond my current knowledge. I was surprised that the authors were interested in oysters, but also loved math. They did not specialize in taxonomy, but they still made important biological discoveries. Researching sea star locomotion last summer was a corroborating experience; I found that topics from complex analysis, signal processing, and mechanical engineering can answer biological questions. However, this first moment in high school transformed my interest from a general love of marine creatures to an interest in using math and physics principles to research marine organisms.”
