Fordham Student Wins Udall Scholarship
Physics Students Win Two-of-Four Conference Awards
Undergraduates Come Out of the Labs, Into the Limelight

Fordham Student Wins Udall Scholarship

By Patrick Verel
Photo by Ken Levinson

Devin Gladden, a Fordham College at Rose Hill junior, has won Fordham University’s first ever Morris Udall Scholarship.

The Udall prize, named for Arizona Congressman Morris K. Udall, is widely considered the highest honor an undergraduate can earn in the environmental science field. For Gladden, it’s an opportunity to tap into a vast network of like-minded policy and science professionals when he attends the organization’s orientation in Tucson in the later summer.

It’s a direction Gladden is eminently prepared for, having spent this past semester observing the interplay of humans and nature in Tanzania, where he is studying. As an example of how actions in the United States impact far away lands, Gladden, an International Political Economy major, noted that he has watched women in Tanzania harvest seaweed from the beaches for use in products made by multinational corporations like L’Oreal.

“I wanted to emphasize the need of the U.S. to understand its global role in environmental issues,” he said. “This emphasizes America’s role as an environmental leader.”

Gladden joins 80 students from 64 colleges and universities (selected from a field of 510 candidates) as a 2008 Udall Scholar. He’ll be returning to the United States at the end of the May, but before he departs for his orientation for the Udall Scholarship, he will head to Princeton University to attend the Public Policy & International Affairs Junior Summer Institute. The institute is an intensive seven-week summer program that focuses on preparing students for graduate programs in public and international affairs and careers as policy professionals, public administrators and other leadership roles in public service.

Gladden’s award comes on the heels of news that ten Fordham students have also been awarded Fulbright Scholarships, breaking a previous record of eight winners. John R. Kezel, Ph.D., director of the Campion Institute of Prestigious Fellowships, said that he felt the award is recognition of Fordham’s commitment to ecology and the environment, as well as the institute’s motto, “Attain the prizes your worth deserves.”

“We have developed wonderful collaborations with the deans, various departments, and faculty friends,” Kezel said. “With such enthusiastic support, our students are now getting the national and international recognition that their “worth deserves."

Posted with permission of Inside Fordham, Fordham University Office of Public Affairs

Physics Students Win Two-of-Four Conference Awards
 
Text and Photo by Kunal Das

Undergraduate students at Fordham are involved in high quality scientific research, a fact underscored by two back to back recent events this Spring.

On April 16th, an Undergraduate Research Symposium on the Rose Hill campus showcased excellent work from all the science departments. That same weekend, Dr. Kunal K. Das, Assistant Professor of Physics at Fordham University, and a key organizer of that symposium, rented a minivan and drove six Fordham physics majors who have been working with him on research projects on a trip to Cornell University in Ithaca, NY. The purpose of the trip was to participate in the Conference of the New York State Section of the American Physical Society.

One of the highlights of that conference was a research poster session for graduate and undergraduate students, with participants from several universities and colleges from across New York State. The Fordham group presented three posters, one was by Matthew Galligan (’10),  another by David Careterro (’08) and a third jointly by Jessica Leszczynski (’08) and Daniel Blessing  (’09). Prizes were given for the four best posters, with no specific ranking. Two of those four prizes were won by Fordham students, David Carretero and Matthew Galligan for research they have been doing with Prof. Das.

David’s research was in the field ultracold atoms, where he looked at the quantum-mechanical properties of the atoms cooled to almost absolute zero, and specifically how those atoms would behave when trapped by a lattice formed by laser light.   Matthew presented his research on a novel method of generating directed electric current in nanoscale circuits by a process called quantum pumping.  Jessica and Daniel’s work was on the application of statistical methods from physics to explain the behavior of cardiac cells directly related to cell contractions that cause heartbeats. 

David will be graduating this year and will attend the University of Cambridge for graduate work in physics. Matthew is a sophomore and has been working with Prof. Das since his freshman year, and its noteworthy he was also a prizewinner at the Undergraduate Research Symposium at the Rose Hill campus this April. Daniel will be doing internship with the FBI this summer and Jessica plans to go graduate school for engineering.  David, Daniel and Matthew are all recipients of the Summer Science Internships at Fordham University. Some of the research was supported by a grant from the Research Corporation received by Prof. Das.

Undergraduates Come Out of the Labs, Into the Limelight

By Janet Sassi
Photo by Michael Dames

Romanian-born Doina Sandor wanted to be a ballerina as a child, and when her parents switched her from dance to tennis, she was miserable.

“My parents liked tennis a lot; to me, it was a pain,” said the 22-year-old Fordham College at Rose Hill senior, women’s varsity tennis player and 2007 winner of the John Kieran Medal for athletic excellence (named for the sports columnist who coined the tennis term “grand slam”). Sandor admits that, eventually, she came around to the sport.

“With time, I understood its qualities,” she said. “On the tennis court, you are alone with your monsters; tennis built me mentally.” Sandor, incidentally, has the highest GPA of any Fordham student-athlete, at 3.947. (“It was that B in American history,” she said, jokingly.)

The Bucharest native’s tennis playing caught the eye of Fordham’s former women’s tennis coach, Gemma Alexander-Mozeak, in 2002, while she was a senior in high school. Sandor wasn’t particularly vying for a sports scholarship; she was depending on good academic scores and good recommendations instead. But when she got the offer to go to college in New York City, she leapt at it—even though she had a broken ankle at the time.

“When I found out, I started packing my bags,” she said. Sandor credits her father with having the “intuition” to see an opportunity for her playing tennis. “He always had in mind that maybe one day I could play tennis for a team in the U.S., but I never thought about it,” she said. “My father had it right.”

Sandor joined the varsity team as a freshman starter in both singles and doubles competition. As a junior, she was named one of six members of the Atlantic 10 Academic All-Conference team; she was named to Phi Beta Kappa the same year.

A Dean’s List senior and a major in international political economy, with a minor in business administration, she has been accepted to the London School of Economics for the fall, but plans to spend one year working in the New York financial markets. Having interned both at the United Nations, and in Strasbourg, France, as part of the 2006 Syracuse University Summer Program on European Human Rights and Conflict Resolution, she hopes to pursue a career related to the policy aspect of law.

“How law is implemented in a civil society is fascinating,” she said. “In watching conflict resolution in Strasbourg, what was clear to me is that most of the conflicts going on around the world would be solved if human rights would be respected. Not with lawyers fighting in court or arguing in front of judges, but with lawyers working at NGOs to raise awareness.”

She looks forward to trying a few jobs before making a final career decision. This summer, she wants to do both paralegal work and give tennis lessons in a private club.

“One of the reasons I chose international political economy is because it brings so many things together,” she said. “I love knowledge—I am a nerd! Long goals are fun but you never know where tomorrow will take you—my entire life is an example of that.”

Posted with permission of Inside Fordham, Fordham University Office of Public Affairs