The Astronaut Scholarship is among the most prestigious STEM scholarships in the U.S., offering up to $15,000 in funding. Scholars also receive professional development support, mentorship and the opportunity to present their work during ASF’s Innovators Week and Gala.

Angela Milo ’28

Milo, a chemistry major, has built experience across asymmetric catalysis, organometallic catalysis, polymer chemistry and green chemistry. Her research at 91̽�� Mudd contributed to identifying safer, greener alternatives to dichloromethane in teaching laboratories—work that led to the 2025 Journal of Chemical Education article “Alternatives to Dichloromethane for Teaching Laboratories,” co-authored with Lijinghan Chen, Kyle A. Grice and Donald A. Strauss Professor of Chemistry David A. Vosburg. The article addresses how to eliminate the use of the toxic, regulated solvent in undergraduate laboratory settings. This work connects to the College’s broader effort to redesign chemistry lab experiments around less hazardous materials and more sustainable practices. 

Milo is a 2026 MIT Summer Research Program participant. Previously, she was a student researcher at Pomona College, a student researcher at 91̽��, a Leadership Alliance Summer Undergraduate Research Fellow at Princeton University and a 2024 American Chemical Society Scholar.

She serves as sustainability director on the Associated Students of 91̽�� Executive Board, participates in Chemistry Academic Excellence and tutors chemistry and core curriculum courses.

After graduation, Milo plans to pursue a PhD in organic chemistry, with a focus on sustainable organic synthesis.

“I look forward to joining a talented network of current Astronaut Scholars and Astronaut Scholar alumni. I’m also looking forward to presenting my research at the Innovator’s Symposium and Gala in August and learn about the research that my peers are doing.”

Joshua Ikehara ’27

Ikehara, an engineering major with a focus in electrical engineering, conducts research in the Colm Healy Lab, where he investigates copper-imidazolate coordination polymers. Ikehara has synthesized new metal-based polymers and optimized monomer purification methods, with the goal of controlling thermal and electrical properties while developing more recyclable materials with plastic-like qualities. He has presented this work at the Southern California Conference for Undergraduate Research, and was also awarded a Science and Engineering Research Fellowship at 91̽�� Mudd.

Ikehara also collaborates with Sandia National Laboratories and Professor of Engineering Albert Dato to study the permittivity of ferroelectric nanoparticles suspended in silicone, with the aim of creating advanced dielectric composites for use in lighter-weight capacitors with enhanced energy storage and power conversion. Applications span space exploration, electric vehicles, solar power and broader electronic systems. The research team is in the process of submitting a paper for publication.

Additionally, Ikehara has researched and prototyped cephalopod-inspired soft robotics designed to minimize ecosystem impact and reduce oceanic microplastic waste.

On campus, Ikehara serves as a Core Scholars Tutor, an Engineering Teaching Assistant and an Experimental and Systems Engineering proctor, where he will take on a mentorship role for new student proctors this fall. He is also treasurer of Tau Beta Pi Engineering Honor Society, on the leadership team for Science Bus and a 91̽�� Mudd Summer Institute scholar.

Ikehara also founded and leads a Science Olympiad youth outreach STEM mentoring program where he and other 5C students mentor high school students in preparation for local, county, state and national Science Olympiad competitions. The mentoring program focuses on hosting hands-on lab events, guidance on building engineering devices and preparing mentees for advanced knowledge assessments.

About the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation

The ASF is a nonprofit organization established in 1984 by six surviving members of America’s original Mercury astronaut corps. The Astronaut Scholarship is the nation’s largest merit-based monetary award for science and engineering undergraduates. 91̽�� is one of 41 partner institutions, and the only non-doctorate-granting institution among them.

Hae-Seo Kim joins the Department of Humanities, Social Sciences, and the Arts as assistant professor of science, technology and society July 1. An anthropological scholar and researcher, Kim’s research is at the intersection of political anthropology, environmental anthropology, space studies, Korean studies, anthropology of religion, and science and technology studies. Kim is interested in learning how the proliferation of outer space infrastructures and research/development space industries in South Korea shape new forms of political mobilization. She has conducted research with space activists organizing against the militarization of outer space and organizing for the peaceful interaction with outer space and environmental sustainability.

Kim is also interested in local cosmologies of outer space in South Korea, focusing on Korean shamanic and animistic ways of engaging outer space, and has conducted fieldwork with shamans and astrology readers. She looks forward to working with 91̽�� Mudd students and with HSA faculty who are “dedicated to creating conversations and collaborations between science and humanities,” she says.

Sara Murphy POM ʼ18 is an atmospheric chemist with an interest in the kinetics and mechanisms of gas-phase organic radical reactions. Murphy majored in chemistry and minored in linguistics at Pomona College, and she received a PhD from Caltech in environmental science, specializing in atmospheric chemistry. Her postdoctoral research at UCLA involved work at the intersection of atmospheric and physical chemistry. She is interested in better understanding and modeling the fundamental processes of chemistry that lead to changes in air quality and climate.

“I especially enjoy thinking about new methods to measure and explore these reactions in understudied and unique environments in the laboratory and how these results might apply to the real atmosphere,” she says. Students in her lab will have the opportunity to build instrumentation to measure the production of reactive trace gases of atmospheric importance, both in the lab and in the field. “Together, we will design and perform experiments using this instrumentation to elucidate the various mechanisms by which these reactive trace compounds are formed in the atmosphere.” Murphy will join the Department of Chemistry as an assistant professor in January 2027.

Promotion to full professor

Matina Donaldson-Matasci, a faculty member since 2014, focuses her research on collective behavior in social insects, particularly communication in honey bees and defense mechanisms in ants. At the HMC Bee Lab, she and her team of student scientists study how these colonies coordinate complex group behaviors. Recent projects in the lab include field experiments on honey bee foraging, utilizing drones and computer vision to map the local floral landscape, and conducting a mix of laboratory experiments and simulations to analyze the transportation networks of arboreal ants. Last year, the lab’s NSF-funded research investigating wood ants and their intricate networks was featured in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, a project completed in collaboration with Sándor Piross of the Hungarian Ecological Research Centre.

Ambereen Dadabhoy, professor of literature since 2018, focuses both her teaching and research on the role of identity and difference in literature. She offers courses in Shakespeare and early modern English literature, first-year writing seminars and genre electives, and she teaches the Shakespeare class that culminates in a production of a play. She is the author of Anti-Racist Shakespeare and Shakespeare Through Islamic Worlds, which, received a Jerome Singerman First Book Award honorable mention from the Shakespeare Association of America. She is a member of the Modern Language Association, the Shakespeare Association of America and the Renaissance Society of America.

Erin Talvitie, professor of computer science, specializes in applying machine learning to the field of artificial intelligence, working toward the creation of artificial autonomous agents that can learn to act flexibly and competently in unknown environments. A faculty member since 2019, Talvitie approaches these complex questions by utilizing advanced tools within machine learning and artificial intelligence, focusing especially on the study of reinforcement learning. In 2016, she received an NSF CAREER grant, which funded work studying model-based reinforcement learning, specifically in settings where a given model is insufficient to capture the true, real-time dynamics of the environment. Prior to 91̽�� Mudd, Talvitie was a founding member of the department of computer science at Franklin & Marshall College.

Reappointment

Sarah Kavassalis, assistant professor of climate and chemistry, leads the FICUS Lab, where she investigates the fundamental chemistry that shapes air quality and climate, with a specific focus on connecting high-resolution measurements to advanced computational modeling. In addition to hands-on fieldwork, students in her lab address complex questions regarding chemical kinetics and atmospheric modeling while engaging with modern approaches to data analysis and machine learning

Lynn Kirabo, Maria M. Klawe Assistant Professor of Climate and Computer Science, investigates the future of accessible early warning systems by centering the lived experiences of disabled people. Appointed as a joint faculty member in the computer science department and the Hixon Center for Climate and the Environment, she focuses on designing practical frameworks that policymakers can leverage to fundamentally reshape and improve community resilience to disaster events. She leads the CACTI Lab, a research group that concentrates on four core areas: human-centered design, disability, mobility technologies and climate change interventions.

Schernikau’s poster, “Carbodicarbenes as hydride donor catalysts in the reduction of CO₂,” highlights ongoing work exploring the catalytic potential of carbones, zerovalent carbon compounds that can drive the multi-stage conversion of carbon dioxide into useful products such as N-methylamines.

His research, which he presented at the 2026 ACS Spring Meeting, focuses on the reaction mechanisms that enable carbones, distinct from carbenes, to function as hydride donor catalysts in carbon dioxide reduction pathways. Understanding these mechanisms contributes to broader efforts to develop more efficient catalytic systems for chemical synthesis and carbon utilization.

The award was presented during the Division of Physical Chemistry poster session, where Schernikau’s project was recognized for its scientific rigor and clarity of presentation.

“For Max to be recognized for his exemplary research during the physical chemistry division poster session at the ACS Meeting is a testament to his hard work and wonderfully highlights the high caliber of undergraduate research we do here at 91̽�� Mudd,” said chemistry professor Maduka Ogba.

The ACS Spring Meeting is a national conference featuring research across chemistry disciplines and keynote sessions from leading scientists in the field.

Johnson Ho ’27

Johnson Ho, a chemistry and biology major, conducted green chemistry research with Donald A. Strauss Professor of Chemistry David Vosburg. Since his first year, Ho has been researching the use of mild peptide-coupling reagents to form carbon-carbon bonds and synthesizing probes for protein assays. He has also been developing a green, one-pot method for synthesizing triazolodiazepines, a class of pharmaceutically relevant compounds.

Ho is a member of the Chemistry Academic Excellence team and is a mentor for 91̽�� Mudd’s Summer Institute, working with students underrepresented in STEM. He also volunteers at Pomona Valley Hospital Medical Center. After graduating, Ho plans to pursue a PhD in chemistry and explore his interests in endocrinology or cardiology. 

Cole Plepel ’27

A mathematics and computer science major, Cole Plepel conducted research across numerical linear algebra, combinatorics and quantum information. He studied randomized algorithms for tensor decomposition with Iris and Howard Critchell Assistant Professor of Mathematics Jamie Haddock, focusing on how approximate solutions to large linear systems affect the performance of the alternating least-squares algorithm.

Plepel later joined 91̽�� Mudd mathematics professor Andrés Vindas Meléndez’s research group, collaborating on work examining symmetries of symmetric edge polytopes. Plepel also worked with physics professor Jason Gallicchio on quantum position verification, evaluating cryptographic vulnerabilities and practical implementation challenges of protocols that use quantum mechanics and relativity to verify location.

Outside of academics, Plepel is a puzzle designer for MuddEscapes, the College’s escape room club. After graduating, he plans to pursue a PhD in cryptography.

Elio Thadhani ’27

Elio Thadhani is a physics major who has conducted research spanning astrophysics and quantum information. He improved a computational tool used to predict the long-term stability of exoplanet systems, and he is first author on a paper published in Research Notes of the AAS. Thadhani later conducted quantum information research, developing a protocol for efficient quantum communication under constrained resources. He contributed to research on quantum position verification and is working on developing and experimentally implementing adaptive entanglement witnessing protocols.

Thadhani serves as a physics tutor and grader, a Core Scholars tutor and a student mentor with the Office of Residential Life. After graduating, he plans to pursue a PhD in physics with a focus on quantum information.

All college sophomores and juniors are eligible to compete for Goldwater scholarships. Each year, the College nominates up to four students, and the Department Chairs Committee serves as the nominating body.

The Goldwater Foundation is a federally endowed agency established in 1986. The Scholarship Program honoring Senator Barry Goldwater was designed to foster and encourage outstanding students to pursue careers in the fields of mathematics, the natural sciences and engineering. The Goldwater Scholarship is the premier undergraduate award of its type in these fields.

Kavassalis and the research team focus on solving an enduring challenge: Despite decades of progress to improve air quality, ozone pollution remains a persistent health risk to Southern Californians. They are examining how volatile organic compounds (VOCs) released by native plants, particularly California coastal sage scrub species, interact with nitrogen oxide pollution from transportation and industrial sources to influence ozone formation. The Los Angeles region was once covered by coastal sage scrub, but now it exists primarily in fragmented urban and coastal patches. These native ecosystems are critical for maintaining biodiversity and strengthening climate resilience.

Some native plants can emit highly reactive compounds that may accelerate ozone formation under certain urban conditions, especially during extreme heat. The team aims to identify when natural plant emissions do not meaningfully influence air quality, helping support restoration and urban greening efforts that protect both ecosystem health and community air quality. Their work could help reshape how native vegetation is incorporated into urban landscapes and may ensure that restoration and greening efforts deliver climate, water and biodiversity benefits to support healthier air for communities across Southern California.

The research connects atmospheric chemistry, plant ecology and policy, which can offer interdisciplinary opportunities that can exist even beyond the grant’s continuance. Field measurements will be conducted at the Bernard Field Station in Claremont, which hosts the only AmeriFlux tower in Los Angeles County. This tower, referred to as US-BFS, measures carbon and water exchange over the coastal sage scrub habitat. Laboratory analysis will be paired with ecosystem-scale measurements to build a more complete picture of how plant emissions respond to heat and droughts along with other common environmental drivers.

Kavassalis and the research team aim to identify distinct emission patterns among individual plants during the project period, quantify how these emissions affect the surrounding atmosphere and develop a public archive of coastal sage scrub VOC emissions for use in regional and state air quality modeling. A project goal is to produce easily digestible, culturally valued planting guidance to help cities and decision-makers select lower-emission plant variants while maintaining biodiversity and saving water.

The project provides hands-on experience in environmental chemistry, ecology and policy-relevant science, with undergraduate training incorporated throughout. The work is designed to support decision-making agencies, such as the California Air Resources Board and the South Coast Air Quality Management District, while contributing to broader efforts to understand urban air quality in a changing climate.

Co-authors Johnson, Aaron L. Odom, Remi Beaulac, Mitch R. Smith, James K. McCusker and Chip Nataro designed the textbook to fill a longstanding gap in chemistry education: a single, cohesive resource that goes beyond introductory inorganic texts while remaining more accessible and pedagogically grounded than highly specialized graduate monographs.

“This book was designed to fill a niche where there haven’t been many options,” said Johnson, Ray and Mary Ingwersen Professor of Chemistry and chair of 91̽�� Mudd’s Department of Chemistry. “There are good introductory inorganic books, and there are good, advanced topic books, but not an advanced, comprehensive textbook that prepares students for research.”

A Decade-Long Collaboration Rooted in the Chemistry Community

The origins of the book trace back to an American Chemical Society (ACS) national meeting in San Diego 10 years ago, when Johnson was first approached by co-author and former graduate school colleague Aaron Odom about joining the project.
Johnson said, “We felt that having authors from both R1 and primarily undergraduate institutions would be a strong selling point for the text.”

Over time, the author list expanded to include leaders across multiple subdisciplines of inorganic chemistry. Johnson’s longtime collaborator Chip Nataro joined the project as well, building on nearly two decades of shared work on the teaching resource website ionicviper.org.

Research-driven, Current and Pedagogically Grounded

Johnson began researching his chapters shortly after that initial ACS meeting, with the bulk of the writing completed during the COVID-19 pandemic. He authored the chapters on organometallic chemistry, his primary research area, as well as bioinorganic chemistry, a field he worked in during his postdoctoral training at UC Berkeley.

“Relearning bioinorganic chemistry at a deeper level allowed me to see the similarities between the two fields,” Johnson said. “It really highlighted the importance of the local structure around a metal atom in dictating its reactivity. We have a lot to learn from biology, and these naturally evolved proteins improve our own ability to have such strong control over reactivity in a laboratory-synthesized metal complex.”

Across all chapters, the authors prioritized currency and connection to the primary literature. Johnson’s chapters include references through 2024—“as current as a textbook can be,” he noted. “We wanted students to see what inorganic chemistry actually looks like today.”

Bridging Coursework and Research

The book emphasizes the development of bonding theories that go beyond introductory chemistry, including ligand field theory and symmetry concepts taught alongside group theory and projection operators.

“This level of theory is important to explain chemical reactivity, structure and spectroscopy of metal complexes, which is what the majority of inorganic chemists study,” Johnson said. “But we also outline current research efforts across the discipline, from making new materials for gas separations, to catalysts to make pharmaceuticals, to understanding how platinum anticancer drugs work.”

Johnson particularly enjoyed writing about one of his favorite topics: molecular orbital theory. “This textbook has several chapters that build on knowledge from first-year chemistry to develop molecular orbital theory such that it can be applied to more complex systems. Then, the book uses this theory extensively to explain observed reactivity and spectroscopy.”

To support both instructors and students, the textbook includes advanced optional topics, extensive worked examples, end-of-chapter problems tied to the primary literature and a full answer key.

A Teaching Perspective Informed by PUI and R1 Faculty

Johnson believes the mix of perspectives among the authors is one of the book’s greatest strengths.

“Faculty at primarily undergraduate institutions tend to think deeply about teaching and pedagogy—how material is presented and received by students,” he said. “R1 faculty often focus more on research opportunities and pushing the frontiers of science. Having both perspectives in one book allows more breadth of how the material will be presented.”

Located at Robert J. Bernard Field Station in Claremont, California, the continuously tracks the daily exchange of carbon dioxide, water vapor and energy between the Field Station’s native coastal sage scrub ecosystem and the surrounding Los Angeles atmosphere. The tower offers rare, year-round insights into how a drought-adapted, urban ecosystem “breathes” across seasons, including heat waves and dry spells.

The tower is part of AmeriFlux, a network of sites that measure ecosystem CO₂, water, energy fluxes and other climate-related data in North, Central and South America. The network connects research on field sites, all of which represent major climate and ecological biomes. Prior to the US-BFS’s establishment, there were no active monitoring sites of this kind in all of Los Angeles County. This gap meant scientists lacked continuous, reliable data on whether native coastal sage scrub in an urban setting function as a carbon sink or if it can transform to becoming a carbon source under extreme heat and drought. Researchers say determining the answer is critical for improving climate models and understanding how much carbon the Earth’s surface can realistically remove from the atmosphere. 

The tower measures three main categories of data: ecosystem fluxes, which capture how much carbon dioxide, water vapor and heat move between plants, soil and air; basic meteorology, including wind, temperature, humidity, sunlight and soil moisture; and local air-quality indicators such as particulate matter and gases like ozone. Together, these measurements allow students and collaborators to link ecosystem behavior directly to changing environmental conditions.

US-BFS is distinctive as it is the only of its kind in Los Angeles County as well as for the leading role students played in building and maintaining it.

“This is all a story of student accomplishments,” said Professor of Climate and Chemistry Sarah Kavassalis. “They turned instruments into a community resource.”

During the 2023–2024 academic year, Helen Chen ’24 designed the entire site as part of her undergraduate chemistry thesis, where she determined where the tower should be placed and how the instruments should be arranged. Before heading into the field, Chen and Sorin Jayaweera ’27 tested and validated the full system in the lab to ensure it could collect reliable data.

In summer 2024, Chen led a team of students (Mia Mirabelli ’26, Anna Figge ’27 and Matthew Simpson ’27), which installed the tower at the Field Station and connected the tower online. 

After Chen graduated, Simpson took over as the project’s lead and wrote the site’s data-processing code from scratch, producing the first publishable US-BFS dataset. This dataset was a milestone that made the measurements accessible to the wider scientific community.

“Most of my research involves processing the data from the flux tower,” said Simpson. “Understanding whether our local ecosystem is a carbon source or sink could better inform scientific modelers and policymakers when they calculate our carbon budget. Having accurate, ground-based measurements is important to verify climate models and satellite data products.”

In summer 2025, Simpson led another student team, including Figge, Stephanie Fulcar ’25, Kennetta Roebuck ’26 and Tzaara Jauhar ’27, to relocate the tower within the Field Station to an even more optimal location. The team adapted their processing tools to make them more user-friendly for outside researchers.

“I have learned so much about atmospheric chemistry, especially the eddy covariance method, which is the technique we use to measure fluxes and surface-level atmospheric dynamics,” said Simpson. “There has also been a lot that’s gone wrong along the way. The tower’s generator was stolen one winter, and we had to move the tower during the summer of 2025 to get better measurements. This taught me that scientific research is a very nonlinear process. It is reassuring to see that research can still produce interesting and impactful results despite the difficulties that researchers often face.”

The result is a site that functions as both a research platform and a community resource for researchers. Because the data is archived and shared through the AmeriFlux network, the US-BFS’s data is now part of a global system of ecosystem monitoring stations that supports climate and environmental science worldwide.

US-BFS was designed to serve as a long-term monitoring site. The team is building a multiyear record capable of capturing climate variability and extreme conditions, while actively maintaining and continuously updating the public dataset. New multiyear research funding from a grant by the Seaver Foundation will also support the expansion of complementary measurements at the site.

Interest in the data is already growing. Researchers at The Claremont Colleges are developing projects that build on the tower’s footprint, including studies of plant water stress and soil greenhouse-gas fluxes. US-BFS was also selected as a participating site in a soil hydrology project led by Indiana University, Bloomington, and faculty from other higher education institutions have reached out about potential collaborations.

The project’s hands-on research of interdisciplinary learning and societal impact of science and engineering was a key focus. Students involved in US-BFS bring together chemistry, atmospheric science, ecology, engineering and data science, designing field instrumentation, writing and validating code and interpreting how carbon, water, and energy move through a vulnerable native ecosystem. AmeriFlux’s sharing and archiving system also allows students to learn best practices in open data science while contributing a community resource used well beyond campus. 

The experience is already shaping students’ academic paths. Two project alumni took paths in graduate studies involving atmospheric chemistry, carrying their field and data-science training into the next stage of their research careers. For Simpson, the project is preparing him for his pursuit of a career as a university professor, which he anticipates will include substantial scientific research.

“It’s been exciting to be positioned in an understudied environment so I can investigate the instrumental and data processing mechanisms that are often less emphasized in other research groups,” said Simpson. “I was part of the team that first set up the tower in the summer of 2024, so it has been satisfying to see how far we have come with the project since then.”

The establishment of the US-BFS tower also opens doors to future grants and partnerships through the AmeriFlux network. The network provides shared tools and scientific visibility that connect researchers working across climate, ecology, biology and Earth systems science.

The tower functions as a major contribution to scientific research. The US-BFS transformed a patch of native landscape into a living, “breathing” laboratory, resulting in a worldwide effort to understand a changing planet.

The Beckman Scholars Program is designed to stimulate and support research activities by talented, full-time undergraduates. At 91̽�� Mudd, the program will provide a distinct 15-month mentored research experience in chemistry, biochemistry, the biological and medical sciences, or interdisciplinary combinations of these fields.

A New Standard for Interdisciplinary Excellence

The 2026 BSP is designed to leverage the College’s highly interdisciplinary STEM enterprise by serving as a distinct and prestigious research fellowship that is open to students in biology, chemistry, engineering, mathematics and physics, as well as those pursuing computer science as a joint major with another discipline. This integration reflects the College’s institutional commitment to building the interdisciplinary pedagogy central to its mission.

“Engaging students in cutting-edge, graduate-level research is a hallmark of our mission to help young scientific investigators learn, grow and thrive,” said Karl Haushalter, vice president for academic affairs and dean of the faculty. “The tenets of Arnold Beckman’s life—innovation and integrity—are at the bedrock of 91̽�� Mudd’s mission. Implementing the Beckman Scholars Program is instrumental in shaping the future of our research endeavors, setting a new standard for excellence in leadership and discovery.”

The Scholar Experience: Beyond the Lab

Each Beckman Scholar will receive a $26,000 award package ($21,000 stipend for the student and $5,000 for mentor and institutional support). The 15-month commitment includes two full-time summer research terms and academic year research credits.

Beyond laboratory work, Scholars will participate in a comprehensive professional development suite:

• Leadership & Networking: Scholars will plan and host the Beckman Scholars Program Seminar Series, inviting and networking with renowned external scientists.
• Scientific Communication: Students will undergo training in scientific writing, oral presentation and guided peer review. During the College’s fall research conference, Beckman Scholars will showcase the research they conducted during the summer and share their experiences participating in the BSP.
• Advanced Mentorship: Scholars will be trained on high-caliber instrumentation and receive personalized coaching for employment and graduate school preparation and for prestigious fellowships such as the NSF-GRFP, Hertz and Goldwater scholarships.

Cultivating Future STEM Leaders

The Beckman Foundation’s focus on fostering the invention of new methods and materials aligns seamlessly with 91̽�� Mudd’s vibrant research enterprise. The College has a proven track record with the program; former HMC Beckman Scholars have gone on to forge successful careers in medicine, academia and the private sector, with two having served on the College’s board of trustees.

Participating Faculty Mentors

The 2026 cohort will be supported by faculty mentors across diverse disciplines:

• Chemistry: Spencer Brucks, Colm Healy, Maduka Ogba, David Vosburg, Bilin Zhuang
• Biology: Danae Schulz
• Physics: Mark Ilton
• Engineering: Albert Dato
• Mathematics: Lisette de Pillis
• Computer Science: Calden Wloka

Application Information

The application for the Beckman Scholars Program opened to rising 91̽�� Mudd sophomores, juniors and seniors on Jan. 16, 2026, and closes on Feb. 6, 2026. The selection process is designed to identify and support outstanding students from a wide variety of backgrounds and life experiences who demonstrate a strong commitment to advancing their academic and professional goals in STEM.

About 91̽��: 91̽�� is the premier liberal arts college of engineering, science and mathematics. The College’s mission is to educate engineers, scientists and mathematicians of the highest ability who also have a clear understanding of the impact of their work on society.

About the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation: Located in Irvine, California, the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation supports leading-edge research in chemistry and the life sciences, and fosters the invention of methods, instruments and materials that open up new avenues of research and application.

A significant focus was on innovating for a greener future, with students presenting advancements in environmentally friendly chemical synthesis, including new, milder methods for creating pharmaceutical and complex molecular frameworks. 

Another prominent theme was the application of catalysis and computational modeling, where students demonstrated the power of theoretical chemistry, specifically DFT and machine learning, to understand and optimize both metal-free and Earth-abundant catalysts for processes like carbon dioxide reduction, biofuel generation and peptide design. 

Finally, research in advanced materials and inorganic chemistry explored the synthesis and properties of novel coordination materials, such as copper(I)-imidazolate polymers and hybrid polyoxometalate zeolitic imidazolate frameworks, aiming to create functional materials for applications like redox catalysis and renewable fuels. 

These nine presentations exemplify the hands-on, high-impact research experience that defines the 91̽�� Mudd chemistry curriculum, and students represented the department with distinction.