2014 Senior Award Winners

Three outstanding seniors in the Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics Department were recognized at the APAM Senior Dinner on May 8, 2014. Each award winner received a glass paper weight and a check for $500. Their names were also inscribed on award plaques in the Department.

Kui Tang, Applied Mathematics Faculty Award
Kui Tang is an exceptional student and researcher. He is an Egleston scholar, has served as president of Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, and coauthored 5 papers during his time here. He spent the summer of 2011 as a HackNY Fellow working at the startup Hunch, which has now been acquired by eBay. Kui will be staying at Columbia to start his Ph.D. work with Prof. David Blei, who just joined the Institute for Data Sciences & Engineering (IDSE) from Princeton.

Matthew Miecnikowski, Applied Physics Faculty Award
Matthew Miecnikowski is an outstanding double major in Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics of remarkable physical insight, quick wit and humility. Though Matt came to Columbia as a prospective engineering major, he became increasingly interested in physics. He did extremely well both in the classroom as well as in the lab, equally comfortable with theory and experiment and has already participated in two computational condensed matter research projects, one at University of Florida and one at Columbia. He plans to attend grad school at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and intends to pursue a career in experimental atomic, molecular, and optical physics.

Rohit Prasanna, Francis B.F. Rhodes Prize
Rohit Prasanna was an outstanding materials science major who excelled in his core courses, in his electives, and in his research projects at the X-ray Research Group at Columbia and abroad at Ecole Polytechnique in Paris. He is interested in materials chemistry, and in the design, synthesis, and application of nanostructured materials. He was accepted to the Ph.D. programs at MIT, Caltech, Stanford, Northwestern, and Cambridge. He has decided to join Stanford for graduate study, and plans to focus on materials science for electronics and energy applications.