Student Spotlight Henry Freer (BS ChBE 2023) First PhD Student on Tech Football Team Henry Freer, a PhD student in ChBE@GT, is doing something thought to be unprecedented in the history of Georgia Tech football and academics. He’s believed to be the first football student-athlete ever enrolled in a PhD program at Tech while still an active player. He’s in his second year as a Yellow Jackets’ starting long snapper after graduating with his BS from ChBE in May. “It’s definitely an honor. It’s exactly what we do here at Tech. We do things people haven’t done before.” “His level of intelligence is off the charts,” said coach Brent Key. Freer first took up longsnapping as a high school sophomore at Woodward Academy. A member of its back-to-back region championship teams, he was recruited to play football by several schools, including Carnegie Mellon and MIT.
But he decided to hang up his cleats to dive into his undergraduate studies at Tech. In May of his senior year of high school, though, Georgia Tech’s coaches reached out to Freer about joining the team as a walk on. “I never yell at him because he might be my boss one day,” said special teams coach Ricky Brumfield.
Maeve Janecka Wins Prestigious Goldwater Scholarship In spring 2023, undergraduate Maeve Janecka earned the prestigious Goldwater Scholarship for her work in science and engineering. From a pool of thousands, 413 scholarships were awarded, with funding of $7,500 per year. “It’s a great honor to be recognized because there were so many talented applicants in both the campus round and the
national Goldwater competition,” Janecka said. “I’m hoping to use the scholarship funding to study abroad in 2024.” After graduation in August 2024, Janecka plans to pursue an MD/PhD and study endometriosis. “My career goal is to work in an academic medical center and be principal investigator of a women’s
health research lab,” she said. Janecka is currently a Petit Scholar in Professor Julie Champion’s lab, where she researches the drug delivery properties of a novel orthopedic implant material. “Our project has shown promising results thus far, and I’m excited to continue working on it throughout the next year,” she said. Janecka said she is grateful to the ChBE community for its dedication to its students. “All of my ChBE professors are amazing educators, and they make this challenging major worthwhile.”
12 SCHOOL OF CHEMICAL AND BIOMOLECULAR ENGINEERING, GEORGIA TECH
