Peter J. Eloranta Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowships are awarded to students planning a summer research investigation or creative study in virtually any field. After reviewing 41 submissions, the Eloranta Fellowship Committee has awarded $6,000 fellowships to the following undergraduates (their project titles follow):
Mathematics sophomore Shien Jin Ong , "Interactive and Zero Knowledge Proofs"; Lianne Habinek , a senior in brain and cognitive sciences from Rochester, Minn., and Joyce Lee , a senior in literature from Libertyville, Ill., for "Shakespeare's 'Open Work': The Circulation of Text and Performance Through Film"; Frederick Choi , a senior in electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) from Louisville, Ky., "Inheriting the Legacy of Stephen Sondheim: Redefining the Musical in the 21st Century"; Jesse Barnes , a senior in biology from Boston, "Worth More Than Gold: Ensuring Adequate Amounts of Safe Drinking Water in Honduras"; Naveen Goela , a junior in EECS from Andover, "The Rhythm of the Tabla: Indian Classical Percussion with Vocals, Sarod, Sitar, Jazz and Dance"; Wendy Ham , a junior in biology from Jakarta, Indonesia, "Brainy Art, Artsy Brain: Using Art to Investigate the Relationship Between the Artistic and Motor Centers of the Brain's Right Hemisphere"; and Oleg Shamovsky , a freshman from Lund, Sweden, "Anomalies of the Electrolytic Oxidation of Aluminum."
First awarded in 1969, the fellowships are a gift from the late Edwin H. Land and were established in memory of the late Peter J. Eloranta, an employee of Polaroid and a member of the Class of 1968.
The Randolph G. Wei Award UROP Award is given to the undergraduate who has made the most outstanding contribution in undergraduate research at the interface of the life sciences and engineering. The award was established in 1986 in memory of Wei, a member of the Class of 1987 who majored in biology and chemical engineering and was a UROP participant.
This year's recipients were Tetsuya Matsuguchi , a senior in biology from Saitama-ken, Japan, and Gitrada Arjara , a senior in chemistry from Bronx, N.Y. Matsuguchi's work includes two manuscripts to be published by DNA Repair and the Journal of Bacteriology on which he was third author and one detailed end-of-term UROP report on which he was sole author. Gitrada's work includes a March 2002 paper in Nature Structural Biology of which he was second author.
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on June 5, 2002.
