U N D E R G R A D U AT E L E A R N I N G
Our Students Win Awards for Faculty-Mentored Research Aerospace Research Recognized Honors student Neale Van Stralen ’18 received the 2017 Dr. Robert H. Goddard Memorial Scholarship from the National Space Club and Foundation at the 60th Annual Goddard Memorial Dinner. The prestigious award supports Van Stralen’s research into the design of aerospace structures necessary for interplanetary transportation of humans. “Neale’s thesis is part of a larger project led by a PhD student that focuses on re-entry vehicle design to improve overall safety and convenience,” says Van Stralen’s advisor, Craig Merrett, assistant professor of mechanical & aeronautical engineering. “Neale is looking at the re-entry trajectories and aerodynamic loads experienced by capsules, such as the Apollo and the current Orion capsule, and the space shuttle. The research requires Neale to complete a number of MATLAB simulations about trajectories and computational fluid dynamic simulations for the aerodynamic loads.”
2017-18 Goldwater Scholars
The Goldwater Scholarship is the most prestigious award in the United States given to undergraduates studying the natural sciences, mathematics and engineering. Two Clarkson Honors students were named among this year’s recipients: Louis DeRidder ’19 Chemical and biomolecular engineering major, with a minor in biology Louis DeRidder interned at the Trudeau Institute in the immunology research department the summer after his first year, assisting with a collaborative project between the Trudeau Institute’s William Reiley and Clarkson’s Professor He Dong. Louis continued this project the following semester, working with Dong on utilizing peptide nanoparticles for gene and drug delivery. He has since completed two research-based co-ops: one with Johnson & Johnson’s R&D team and the other with the Center for Nanomedicine at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Timothy Dunn ’19 Electrical engineering and computer science double major, with a mathematics minor Timothy Dunn has conducted research at Clarkson since his first year under the mentorship of Professors Sean and Natasha Banerjee. His research has included improving automated software problem report triaging by accelerating report comparisons using a graphics processing unit. He was also a summer intern at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
27 Goldwater Scholars in 15 years President’s Report
