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From left, John Conley, CC'02; David Tsay, CC'01, and David Kagan, CC'02.
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Three Columbia College students were recently named among the nation's best undergraduates majoring in either math, science or engineering by the Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation for the academic year 2000-2001. The winners of a Goldwater Scholarship are David Tsay, CC'01, and John Conley, CC'02. David Kagan, CC'02, is an honorable mention.
"I am honored and flattered to win such an award," Conley said. "And I think it is good that, in general, recognition is being given to students in the sciences."
Tsay said: "Winning the Goldwater certainly has been a surprising honor for me [because] I haven't won or pursued many scholarships or prizes in the past; I was happy when I heard that I was even nominated. [It] is nice in that it is recognition for the work I have done."
The Goldwater Scholarship, awarded annually to some 300 college sophomores and juniors throughout the United States and Puerto Rico, is the most prestigious undergraduate prize in the fields of math, science and engineering.
Tsay, from Toms River, N.J., is a double major in physics and computer science. He credits his interest in physics to Jim DiCarlo, an inspiring physics teacher at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, where Tsay went to high school. In particular, Tsay described a senior project with DiCarlo, during which they "blew up a few power supplies" while creating an electron beam in a mayonnaise jar used as a vacuum container, that ignited his passion for physics.
About his second major, computer science, Tsay said, "There's nothing like creating a program which can solve some problem, or even play Stratego with you-my last project, although it didn't play quite as well as I would have liked."
Outside the classroom, Tsay works in Professor Rafael Yuste's neurobiology lab researching the behavior of neural cells in the brain. He also spends time designing Web pages for a company called Dreamwerk, which he founded with two classmates. Dreamwerk already has the design of the Lyric Chamber Music Society's Web site to its credit.
Conley explained that although the greater part of his attention while a middle school student in Chapel Hill, N.C., was taken by Transformers toys and baseball cards, an interest in physics was nevertheless sparked by reading such books about the field as Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time. But it was not until he came to Columbia and took professor Allan Blaer's physics class in his first semester that Conley resolved to make physics his major.
Last year and through the summer Conley worked for professor Jamie Nagle, a member of Columbia's contingent in the experiment dubbed PHENIX at Brookhaven National Laboratory's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider on Long Island. His work consisted of writing a computer program that will be used to analyze the data the PHENIX detector gathers. He is now beginning a new project for astronomy professor David Helfand involving a radio astronomy problem related to the clustering of radio sources.
Conley will spend the next academic year, his junior year, in England, where he will study physics at Cambridge University. After Columbia, he will likely go straight to graduate school to pursue advanced studies in theoretical physics. "If possible, I would love to enter the new area of string theory, and see if I can make some contributions there," he said.
Conley contributes beyond the classroom by tutoring high school students enrolled in the Double Discovery Center; he calls this his "most rewarding extracurricular activity." He is also a member of Columbia's hiking club and an avid basketball player who participates in campus intramural games.
Kagan, a native New Yorker, also credits Professor Blaer with shaping his course of study at Columbia. (Kagan is in fact a double major in math and in physics.) Taking Blaer's accelerated physics course was "certainly one of the key influences in my decision to go into math/physics," Kagan said.
"[Blaer] has been such a great help, and role model for me . . . being taught by him and just meeting with him to talk has been and is a great pleasure."
Despite a college career not yet half done, Kagan already has contributed to several research projects. As a freshman he worked under the supervision of professor Tsvi Piran, an expert in black holes and gamma ray bursts. For mathematician Igor Krichever, Kagan performed geometry research that he describes as "heavily dependent on differential geometry, complex analysis and soliton theory."
Kagan is now working with Krichever on a project using algebraic-geometry and complex analysis.
When not in the classroom or the research lab, Kagan can be found by the pool in the Dodge Physical Fitness Center, managing Columbia men's varsity swimming and diving team. And this past weekend, he participated in the Columbia Community Outreach program for the second consecutive year.
The 2000-2001 Goldwater Scholars and Honorable Mentions were selected from a field of 1,176 math, science and engineering students nominated by the professors of their colleges and universities. A Goldwater Scholarship is worth $7,500 to be applied to tuition, fees, books, and room and board.
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