Summer 2005

Two Receive Goldwater Scholarships

For the second consecutive year, a Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology student was selected among the nation’s premiere undergraduate students in mathematics, science and undergraduate fields as a Barry M. Goldwater Scholar.

However, the honor was double the pleasure this year as juniors Angela Smiley and Amelia “Mae” Huehls joined students from Harvard, Stanford, Princeton and California Institute of Technology on the list of 320 scholars -– from a field of 1,091 nominees –- to receive the one- and two-year $7,500 scholarships.

Virtually all of this year’s Goldwater Scholars intend to obtain a Ph.D. as their degree objective.

Smiley is striving to earn bachelor degrees in three academic areas: computer science, mathematics and physics. The 3.9 GPA student also plans to earn a master’s degree in electrical and computer engineering at the college, before earning a Ph.D. in computer science, specializing in artificial and simulated intelligence, and becoming a college professor. She hopes to become a pioneer in the field of AI/SI as a researcher and started that goal this summer with an internship at Microsoft.

On campus, Smiley has helped develop educational applets, supported by the National Science Foundation, for use in a geometric modeling mathematics course; has been a member of Rose-Hulman’s College Bowl team; has been a member of the college’s programming team in the International Collegiate Programming Competition; is a staff writer for the student newspaper; and was named Most Outstanding Junior in last fall’s Mathematical Association of America Tri-State Mathematics Competition.

Huehls majors in applied biology and hopes to become a college researcher in the field of immunology. Her career goals are personal. She has an allergy to dairy products. Though it was known since her infancy that she was allergic to dairy, as a child she was able to tolerate consuming some dairy products with only moderate discomfort. At the age of 12, she began to suffer from increasingly severe reactions to dairy, and at 16 years of age she was unable to consume anything containing as much as a trace amount of dairy. The allergy profoundly altered her diet and lifestyle, and she has been unable to obtain answers as to why her allergy progressed the way it did at the time that it did.

Alicia Cecil, former assistant professor of applied biology, states about Huehls: “It is somewhat unusual to have a student with such focus and drive to make discoveries in a scientific field at her level of study. I believe her level of desire and focus, combined with her intellect, will lead to important discoveries in the field of immunology.”

This summer, Huehls conducted chemical research with Professor Daniel Morris as part of Rose-Hulman’s Interdisciplinary Research Collaborative in Biology and Chemistry.

At Rose-Hulman, Huehls is Vice Master Alchemist of the Alpha Chi Sigma professional chemistry fraternity, was secretary of the Alpha Lambda Delta Freshman Honor Society (2003-04), and is a member of the Residence Hall Association -- all while maintaining a 4.0 grade point average.