The National Space Grant Foundation is pleased to announce the 2017 John Mather Nobel Scholar recipients. The recipients will be honored at an awards ceremony July 21st in Greenbelt, Maryland. The John Mather Nobel Scholarship Program was established in 2008 by the John and Jane Mather Foundation for Science and the Arts. The program is open to current NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center based undergraduate and graduate student interns. Each year the program awards travel allowances towards the cost of presenting research papers at professional conferences. Applicants must have demonstrated high academic achievement, have a strong interest in space and Goddard Space Flight Center, be a rising undergraduate junior, senior or graduate student, and be currently holding a Goddard-based research internship.
Selected students are recognized as John Mather Nobel Scholars and receive a $3,000 travel allowance towards the cost of presenting research papers at professional conferences. Recipients will meet with Dr John C Mather, Senior Astrophysicist and Goddard Fellow and Nobel Prize recipient, and other distinguished individuals.
One of the recipients, Jalal-ud-din Butt, expressed that he, “…was recently extended an offer to intern at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland to work on the navigation of OSIRIS-REx onto an asteroid – the first asteroid sample return mission in U.S. history. Working on a mission as exciting as this has been a dream that I have been working towards for almost as long as I could look up and ponder about the sky.”
The 2017 John Mather Nobel Scholar recipients are:
- Daniel Brack – University of Colorado
- Zachary Bruick – Colorado State University
- Jalal-ud-din Butt – Central Connecticut State University
- Jordan A Caraballo-Vega – University of Puerto Rico
- Natalie DeNigris – University of Massachusetts Amherst
- Jessica Fayne – University of California, Los Angeles
- Allison Fox – Pennsylvania State University
- Jitin Krishnan – George Mason University
- Violet Replicon – New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology
- Sarena Robertson – Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University
- Kristine Romich – California State University, Northridge
- Katarina Yocum – Emory University