Three students earn Goldwater Scholarship

Few students on campus could be more different than Andrew Marin, A.J. Friend and Jonathan Diaz. Their interests run the gamut from engineering solvents to playing soccer to filmmaking, so what links them together? All three second-year students have been designated recipients of this year's prestigious Goldwater Scholarship, which supports studies in engineering, mathematics and the natural sciences. Named in honor of Arizona senator Barry M. Goldwater, the merit-based award covers expenses for tuition, fees, books and room and board up to a maximum of $7500 per year for two years.

Andrew Marin, a Chemical Engineering major originally from Plano, Texas, came to Tech for its sterling reputation and found more than he expected. "The way I look at the world has changed," he said. "One of the best things that Tech has done for me is making me think like an engineer."

Active in Alpha Chi Sigma, the Student Advisory Board and the American Institute for Chemical Engineers, Marin also finds time for triathlons and extracurricular reading. His main interest, however, remains the subject that convinced him to move east for his studies.

"Why chemical engineering? I like the engineering aspect because of its application - it has a purpose that can affect people. And chemistry just makes sense to me. I see the world in molecules and atoms," Marin said.

Going beyond classroom material, Marin is conducting research in chemical engineering with Professors Charles Eckert and Charles Liotta. His work involves tunable solvents, substances whose physical properties can be fine-tuned to result in better reactions. Marin studies supercritical fluids, or gas-expanded liquids, which comprise an emerging genre of tunable solvents. These new solvents could help to streamline chemical processing, which would have important implications for the food and pharmaceutical industries.

A.J. Friend shares a similar passion for his field of study. A sophomore from West Haven, Conn., Friend is majoring in discrete mathematics.

"I've always liked solving [math] problems. It's like a competition between you and the problem. You get into it and get excited about it. I was working on a problem one night and nothing I tried worked, but I still had a great time," he said.

Friend became involved in mathematics research with Professor Mason Porter during his freshman year at Tech. He concentrates on network theory, which he explains as "a graph with nodes that are connected to each other by edges, used to try to understand complex systems." One such system Friend has focused on is the partisanship and power networks in the U.S. House of Representatives. Using algorithms to detect political connections, he has studied structural shifts in the organization of the Democratic and Republican parties in the House.

Friend has other interests as well. Outside the lab, he plays intramural soccer and is involved with the Tech chapter of the National Society of High School Scholars.

He will spend next fall at Penn State as part of the Mathematics Advanced Studies Semesters program.

"The Goldwater has opened up a lot of doors, especially for undergraduate programs and graduate schools," Friend said.

Physics major Jonathan Diaz likewise has extensive interests in research. The Atlanta native started out in Tech's PicoForce nanotechnology lab, studying the atomic origins of friction and other phenomena. However, finding theoretical physics more to his taste, Diaz will be working with Professor David Finkelstein in the fall.

Diaz's upcoming research topic? Fixing string theory. Present field theories, like the string theory, are built out of unbounded oscillators, but Diaz and Finkelstein hope to recast them in terms of rotators, which set limits.

"Our ultimate goal is to quantize the theory of gravity," Diaz said. "This is also the quest of the string theory, but it starts at an arbitrary point ... and is ultimately untestable. We will try to fit general relativity and quantum mechanics together [in a new way] using rotators."

When not pondering the mysteries of physics, Diaz can be found working on his next film. He has just completed his first feature-length movie, titled "Disruptions," or, for the physics-literate, "Our Emotions Invariant Upon Coordinate Transformation." He is in the process of writing the screenplay for another movie.

With the support from the Goldwater Scholarship, all three students plan on continuing to graduate school and later pursuing either teaching or research, or some combination thereof.