2017 Undergraduate Award Winners

May 15 2017

Three APAM seniors were presented with awards at the APAM Department Senior Dinner on Tuesday, May 2. Each winner was selected by the faculty in recognition of their excellent academic achievements.
 

Lauren Riddiford, Applied Physics Faculty Award
Lauren maintained an excellent GPA throughout her undergraduate years, earning no less than seven A+ grades. She was also involved in research in material science as well as at research in high-energy physics at the CERN laboratory in Switzerland, where she spent a semester of her junior year. One faculty member said, “She was exceptional. She applied herself to understanding physics while also actively being involved in dance at Columbia.” Lauren will be continuing her graduate studies in physics at Stanford.

Andres Soto, Applied Mathematics Faculty Award
Andres has a passion for bio-mimicry and sustainable design and has sought to understand how patterns of nature can influence innovation and creativity. He is a student of Chinese language and was a recipient of a 2014 Presidential Global Fellowship. One faculty member said, “Andres consistently demonstrated a keen intellect and inquisitiveness in all of his classes. He also has contributed to his own peers’ education by helping to develop advanced course materials for numerical methods.” Another faculty member commented “He was one of the most participatory members of the senior seminar, closing with an excellent talk on Consensus in Collective Dynamics, building on work by Professor Eitan Tadmor, which he presented with his colleague Nellie Leddy.

Erica Yee, Francis B. F. Rhodes Prize for Materials Science
Erica is one of our cherished materials majors. During her sophomore year, she studied abroad at University College London (UCL). Outside of classes, she also actively participated in and was a board member for both the Society of Women Engineers and the women’s Ultimate Frisbee Club. She was also an ESC Peer Major Advisor and Peer Advisor at the Office of Global Programs. One faculty member said, “Her senior design project involved assembling and implementing an X-ray fluorescence detector into the group’s X-ray chamber, which allowed for the successful qualitative elemental analysis of various materials.” In the fall, Erica will start working at Northrop Grumman.

A professor stands with three students

Photo: (Left-right) Prof. I.C. Noyan, Lauren Riddiford (AP), Erica Yee (MSE), and Andres Soto (AM)

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