Many of you read that we recently lost one of our original Mercury Seven astronauts and national Space heroes, Scott Carpenter, who was also one of the founders and ongoing supporters of the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation (ASF). Since 1986, ASF has awarded more than $3.7 million in scholarships and now awards 28 scholarships annually of $10,000 each to outstanding college students who exhibit motivation, imagination, and exceptional performance in science and technology fields. These scholarships go to a select group of institutions that include MIT, Georgia Tech, and others, as well as Texas A&M, based on these institutions' initiative, creativity, and excellence in the fields of science, mathematics, and engineering.
For the first time in its history, AFS has awarded two scholarships to the same institution in a single award year-Texas A&M University. I am thrilled to congratulate both of our outstanding nominees, and winners, on this honor: Dillon Amaya '14, majoring in meteorology and Amanda Couch '14, majoring in electrical engineering. One is already a gifted scientist and the other, a gifted engineer. Both have demonstrated a passion for solving complex research problems.
Dillon Amaya says he had a love of science from childhood and a curiosity to "understand how the world works." By the time he arrived at Texas A&M, he knew he wanted a hands-on approach to his field and was inspired to focus on understanding, predicting, and publicizing the immense implications of global climate change. His drive and curiosity to explain the future by investigating the past began in an Oceanography research laboratory on campus that led him to an internship in Alaska, then out onto the open ocean on a research vessel. Last year, Dillon presented his research and defended his work at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union.
Amanda Couch's childhood dreams of superpowers and Space battles have matured into a fascination with communication-both in Space and to local communities, to inspire others with the enormous potential of applied electronics. Her journey has taken her from the Texas A&M Electromagnetics and Microwaves Laboratory to high school engineering summer camps and an internship with Boeing. Currently she is developing a reconfigurable antenna and measurement system for educational purposes, intended for use in a high school physics or engineering setting, and presented on her work last year at a symposium of the Institute of Electronics and Electronics Engineers.
Both of these exceptional students have combined intellectual drive and talent with unique opportunities for undergraduate research at Texas A&M, and found a lifetime calling, one that we hope will lead them to become established as visionaries of their fields and improve the world for all of us. Both will be recognized for these accomplishments next week with their scholarship presentations from the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation.
The program will be an occasion to hear from one of our leaders in the Space industry, Kennedy Space Center Director Robert Cabana, a veteran of four space shuttle missions that included the first assembly mission for the International Space Station. (If you haven't seen the movie Gravity yet, I encourage you to do so and then come to hear from someone who has actually been in Space!) The program is open to the campus community and public, and is free of charge, thanks to sponsorship by the ASF, Honors and Undergraduate Research, and the Office of the Provost.
Programs like this bring to the forefront the academic scholarship of our students and the value of opportunities for them at an institution like ours through internships, international experiences, research with renowned faculty, and service to the community at large.
I hope you will join me on October 28!
Tags: ASF, Astronaut Scholarship Foundation, astronauts, research, students, Suma Datta
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Source: Tamu
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