Three juniors in the University Honors Program at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities have been recognized as Goldwater Scholars by the Barry Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation. Anna Sachdeva, Ahmed Sharara, and Jack Tavakley will receive scholarships worth up to $7500 for the next academic year. This prestigious, nationally competitive scholarship is awarded annually to outstanding sophomores and juniors who intend to pursue research-oriented careers in mathematics, the natural sciences, and engineering. This year 454 students were recognized as Goldwater Scholars out of 1,485 nominees from 482 colleges and universities nationwide. The University of Minnesota Twin Cities has now had 77 students recognized as Goldwater Scholars since the creation of the program in 1989.
A torn ACL as a teenager motivated Anna Sachdeva of Lakeville to start thinking about how the body repairs itself. Now a Neuroscience major working in Professor Ann Parr’s lab at the Stem Cell Institute of the Medical School, she has investigated the differentiation of neural progenitor cells to rebuild sensorimotor circuitry in rodent spinal cord models. Currently, she is developing and executing a study investigating how dorsal and ventral neural progenitor cells interact with each other. She hopes that targeted differentiation strategies derived from this research may improve movement and sensation after spinal injuries. As an aspiring academic neurosurgeon, Anna has also conducted research on clinical practice regarding neurosurgery handoffs and deep brain stimulation with Dr. Anant Naik. On campus, she leads the Undergraduate Surgery Interest Group, and in the community, she volunteers and serves on the Preventative Health Committee at the Philips Neighborhood Clinic. The College of Biological Sciences has recognized her leadership, service, and scholarly excellence with its Richard S. Caldecott Award. She recovered from her ACL injury and is an active practitioner of Taekwondo.
Ahmed Sharara of Arden Hills fell in love with the science fair in elementary school and he has been investigating research questions and engineering problems ever since. In his first semester he joined the lab of Professor Bhairab Singh and helped to analyze cryoprotective agents that could improve the preservation of donor hearts and engineered tissues. Since then, he has continued to work in the Singh Lab, planning and executing a project to investigate the mechanisms of maturation in cardiomyocytes, and developing an automated tool to more quickly and accurately analyze fluorescent images of cardiomyocytes. He also worked on joint research projects with Professors John Bischof and Brenda Ogle and recently published the results of a study of the evolution of sarcomeric disorganization over time in the development of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. On campus, Ahmed is a co-founder and leader of MEDIC, an organization that empowers students to design medical devices through contests and teamwork. He is similarly involved with Engineering World Health, and he volunteers in the Emergency Department of Masonic Children’s Hospital. He plans to complete a PhD in biomedical engineering and to continue searching for answers and solving problems in his own university lab.
Jack Tavakley began working on electronics and programming projects for an inventors’ fair in elementary school and continued to explore and create independently as a highschooler in Apple Valley. He entered the university planning to combine physics with a computer science major, although he was also interested in econometrics, and then electrical engineering began to look interesting. A conversation with physics professor, Ke Wang, led to a position in his lab, and that is when Jack discovered graphene. He spent the year stacking and exfoliating 2D nanomaterials to create Van der Waals heterostructures which exhibited a wide range of exotic quantum phenomena. This led to contributions to articles published in Physics Review and the Journal of Physical Chemistry and confirmed his interest in experimental physics. He continues to work in the Wang lab studying electron flow through point junctions in bi-layer graphene that has potential applications in quantum computing. Curious to learn more about the tools that enable experimentation with nanomaterials, Jack spent last summer at an NSF REU at the University of Colorado working with atomic force microscopy, and he continues to work remotely with Professor Marcus Raschke’s lab there. On campus, he has worked as a learning assistant with Professor Paul Haines, and he has been recognized for his academic performance and research with a St. Cyr Scholarship from the School of Physics and Astronomy. Jack plans to complete a PhD in condensed matter or AMO physics and direct a lab developing quantum devices.
University of Minnesota, Twin Cities students who are interested in applying for the Goldwater Scholarship in the future may consult the Office of National and International Scholarships by visiting onis.umn.edu or by contacting Timothy Jones at [email protected].
For more information on the Goldwater Scholarship, visit goldwater.scholarsapply.org/index.php.