On the national level, 302 scholars were selected from a field of 1,164 applicants. Each submitting four-year college or university is allowed to nominate four applicants.
To compete successfully, a high GPA as well as significant summer research in a science-related field is required. Winners receive a $7,500 stipend to be credited towards the student's tuition bill for the remainder of his or her undergraduate career.
According to Fellowships Coordinator Denise Gagnon, the competition for this scholarship was "incredible." This year, 11 Amherst students submitted applications to the Fellowships Office, seven were called back for interviews, and four were ultimately selected. "Even before reaching the national level, the applicants are faced with tough competition," said Gagnon. "A five-member board of faculty interviews and then selects the most impressive applications."
The application must include a transcript, two letters of recommendation and several essays inquiring into the applicant's research. Students submitted applications in October, interviewed in December and heard back early in April.
Gagnon said that this year's applicants were particularly successful due to the advanced nature of the students' research projects.
Sullivan worked in a lab at the University of Illinois at Chicago, performing research in pharmacology. She worked with platelets and identified key characteristics of the formation of blood clots. In the future, her research will prove useful in creating "an emergency drug to prevent blood clotting during open-heart surgery," according to Sullivan.
Sullivan was also selected as the recipient of the Kauffman Fellowship for biomedical research to perform this study.
Maloof spent last summer at the Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratory in Cambridge, Mass. He worked on a project involving speech recognition in computer applications. His job was to create an interface to be used in designing other programs.
"Basically, I was creating a mini-programming language," said Maloof.
Transforming natural language into a program can be difficult, he added. The key, according to Maloof, is to design a framework that recognizes commands without listing them individually.
Maloof said that he believes "mice and keyboards will never disappear. The option, though, to do things by speech will hopefully arise in five years." Maloof plans to work on a similar project this summer, though he is unsure of his future plans.
Hummon, the third winner, remained at Amherst this past summer to work with Professor of Physics Larry Hunter on a project regarding special relativity. Hummon said that his job was to study "special relativistic effects of electrodynamics in a rotating reference plane."
Hummon took a cylinder and spun it in a magnetic field and measured the voltage. Jared Hertzberg '97 started the research that Hummon conducted and it was continued by Sarah Bickman '00. Hummon decided to further study special relativity because Hertzberg never got results while Bickman's findings supported neither Einstein's prediction nor Swift and Pellegrini's prediction. Hummon, therefore, conducted this experiment intending to ameliorate precision measurements.
"One of the main hindrances encountered in the past has been that the noise level prevents a clear signal from being logged," Hummon said.
His research confirmed Einstein's theory of special relativity.
The fourth recipient of the Goldwater scholarship, Snyder conducted most of her research in high school, three hours a day during the academic year and full time during her junior and senior summers.
Living in the Washington, D.C. area was quite advantageous, according to Snyder, because she was able to work at the National Institute of Health. The lab in which Snyder was placed concentrated on basic research in the genetics and regulatory mechanisms of Escherichia coli (E. coli).
"I worked with a scientist named Dr. Susan Garges and attended journal clubs, lab meetings and discussions, gave several detailed presentations at both lab meetings and summer student seminars, and was treated like a colleague by the lab members," Snyder said.
Snyder's research "investigated strains of E. coli with mutated icdA" and found that "the mutation not only disrupts the TCA cycle but some larger unknown regulatory mechanism as well."
Snyder's research was so extensive and well appreciated by Garges that she will be published as first author of an article in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Bacteriology.
This year's selection board members were Professor of Political Science Hadley Arkes, Associate Professor of Fine Arts Nicola Courtright, Professor of English Richard Cody, Professor of Philosophy Jonathan Vogel, and Professor of Mathematics Daniel Velleman, the chair of the committee.