Special Awards

Oak Award | Ivy Award | Lang Award | McCabe Engineering Award

The Oak Award, given to "the woman of the graduating class who is outstanding in leadership, scholarship, and contributions to the college community," was awarded to Roseanna Sommers.

An Evans Scholar and Flack Achievement Award winner, Roseanna achieved highest honors with a major in psychology and a minor in educational studies. She is also a member of Sigma Xi. Last summer, as a Research Experience for Undergraduates Scholar at the Florida Mental Health Institute in Tampa, she conceptualized, designed, and conducted an original research project on the effects of gender, race, ethnicity, and age on the dosing and monitoring of antidepressant medications among Florida Medicaid enrollees. As first author on the resulting manuscript, she received an Outstanding Research Award. She recently received a prestigious National Institutes of Health fellowship to study bioethics after graduation.

Roseanna's involvement as a volunteer and student leader is rich and deep, borne out of a sincere desire to help people and serve her community. She has served as a resident advisor, student representative on the Committee for Educational Policy, volunteer with Pémon Health in Urimán, Venezuela, volunteer tax preparer in Chester, and teacher's aide at the Pennsylvania School for the Deaf in Philadelphia. To her Learning for Life partners, with whom she worked for much of her time at the College, she is their "angel from heaven."

The Ivy Award, given to "the man of the graduating class who is outstanding in leadership, scholarship, and contributions to the college community," was awarded to Anson Stewart.

A Lang Opportunity Scholar and Writing Associate, Anson majored in urban studies, a program of his own design, and engineering. He is a member of Tau Beta Pi, the National Engineering Honor Society. He has also served as a Writing Associate, an Intercultural Center intern and Tri-Co facilitator, and as a class officer.

Anson has a deep passion for transportation, the environment, and urban development and has found creative and effective ways to blend these interests and share them with the community. As a Lang Scholar, he founded greenRELAY, an online community organizing project based in Los Angeles that motivates high school and college students to get involved in local environmental issues. Last summer, he worked with low- to moderate-income youth to develop the website, attend city government meetings, participate in rallies, and report on environmental issues in L.A. through online articles and blogs.

Next year, Anson will travel widely on a Watson Fellowship to study the sale and reuse of school buses and jitneys from the U.S. and Europe to the global south. His project will look at the reuse of these vehicles as they relate to personal mobility, global sustainability, and environmental justice. Following his Watson year, Anson will study transportation and urban planning at MIT.

The Lang Award, given to "a graduating senior in recognition of outstanding academic accomplishment," was awarded to Benjamin Good.

Ben earned highest honors as an honors physics major and mathematics minor with a course major in mathematics. A Goldwater Scholar, Ben has excelled in the classroom and in the laboratory and has broad experience as a young researcher. Over the past three summers, he has worked at the Santa Fe Institute, a non-profit, trans-disciplinary research community that expands the boundaries of scientific understanding. He is the first author on a paper that appeared in the April 2010 Physical Review E, a publication of the American Physical Society. This is an extraordinary achievement for an undergraduate. The paper, "Performance of modularity maximization in practical contexts," uses the mathematical idea of networks to understand the structure and evolution of complex physical, biological, and social systems.

In addition to his excellent academic work, Ben has also been singled out by faculty members for his kindness, compassion, and humility. Ben plans to pursue a Ph.D. in physics next year at Harvard University.

The McCabe Engineering Award, presented each year to the "outstanding engineering student of the graduating class," was awarded to Ekin Dogus Çubuk.

Çubuk, one of only four seniors to earn both a B.A. and a B.S. degree, achieved high honors in physics and engineering. Originally from Istanbul, Turkey, Çubuk served as a tutor and Engineering Wizard, assisting fellow students with engineering projects, and completed a senior project on circuit design and memory-enabled elements. He is also the co-author of a paper, "Specialization as an Optimal Strategy Under Varying External Conditions," that was delivered during the proceedings of the 2009 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation in Kobe, Japan, last summer.

Professors of Engineering Lynne Molter '79 and Erik Cheever '82 advised Çubuk, who used genetic algorithms to explore the possibility of developing circuits capable of learning from past states and modifying their own behavior. He also received a Halpern Family grant to support some of his research. This fall, he will study applied physics and engineering at Harvard University.