Special Awards

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

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 Dougal Sutherland.

Dougal is best known as editor-in-chief of The Daily Gazette, a role he has served since 2009. He has been committed to the Gazette since his freshman year, when he started out as a reporter and programmer. Later he became its technical director and was responsible for bringing needed innovation and efficiency to a website that is read daily by hundreds of students, faculty and staff. As an editor, Dougal has been admired for his thoroughness, balance, and deep sense of responsibility.

The Gazette work takes up an enormous amount of Dougal's time. Despite that, he remains involved in many other campus activities. This includes working as a DJ for the college radio station, serving as an IT Associate and grader for various classes, being a member of the College Computing Society, contributing constructively to the ITS Committee, and actively pursuing his hobbies of hiking and scuba diving.

A major in computer science with minors in linguistics and mathematics, he graduates with high honors. We are delighted to recommend Dougal for the Ivy Award.

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

Kathryn is the epitome of the scholar-athlete. She is a biology and German studies double major and a member of Sigma Xi. At the same time, she has become a nationally-ranked athlete. Her basketball honors and accolades are too long to list here, but the highlights include her being Swarthmore's all-time leading rebounder, the NCAA record holder for career double-doubles (scoring in double digits, and double digit rebounds in a single game), and being named an All-American three times.

In her role as a team leader, Kathryn is described as "selfless" and "heroic." In addition to basketball, Kathryn joined the tennis team for two years because it was short players. She helped the tennis team get back on its feet, while continuing to excel in basketball and academics – an enormous commitment of time and energy in the best interest of Swarthmore Athletics.

In addition, Kathryn makes time for numerous extracurricular activities, including volunteering in hospitals and at sport camps and clinics. She is an active member of the German Club, Swarthmore Health Society, and Swarthmore College Wind Ensemble.

Before she heads off to medical school, and for what will surely be an outstanding career in medicine, Kathryn will be teaching English in Germany next year under a Fulbright grant.

The Lang Award, given to "a graduating senior in recognition of outstanding academic accomplishment," was awarded to two individuals who we find equally worthy of the honor: Daniel Dandurand and Zachary Postone.

A farm kid who grew up in rural Vermont, Dan has distinguished himself in the study of Physics and Mathematics. He has both experimental and simulation research experience, including high-performance computing.

In the summer of 2009 he conducted a 10-week research project at the University of Washington under a Physics REU (Research Experiences for Undergraduates). Since last summer he has been performing ongoing research in plasma physics, investigating plasma dynamics via particle simulations. Dan presented his work at a meeting of the American Physical Society Division of Plasma Physics last November in Chicago, and is co-author of a paper that will soon be published in the Review of Scientific Instruments.

Dan recently won the Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship – a highly competitive and prestigious award that will provide him with a generous stipend and support his work at the Krell Institute and Berkeley. Our College has produced many bright scientists, including several Rhodes Scholars and NSF recipients. Dan ranks among the best of them and we are pleased to nominate him for the Lang Award.

Zach is a Political Science major with minors in Art and Public Policy. He is graduating with Highest Honors. He has excelled academically across a diverse set of courses, including quantitative political science, normative political theory, physics, and three different studio art classes.

A keen intellect and elegant writer, Zach is known for always pushing himself outside of his academic comfort zone, doing readings and research above and beyond what was assigned in class. He was fundamental in encouraging the Political Science department to create a course in the history of economic thought – a class that has evolved into a regular offering of the department.

With an interest in urban and environmental studies, Zach wrote a thesis on comprehensive approaches to vacant land management reform and its applications in Philadelphia, uniting an impressive array of historical research, case studies, and municipal policy analysis. It is work that will doubtless prove useful to municipal authorities in the future.

Zach has held impressive internships related to his academic interests, including work at the Center for Urban Pedagogy and the Affordable Housing Initiative at the US Green Building Council, and volunteer work for ViviendasLeon Rural Housing in Leon, Nicaragua.

Zach's work as an artist is no less impressive. His multi-media senior thesis exhibition at the List Gallery incorporated video clips, geographic modeling, aerial photography and other digital representations of space to draw the viewer into a "strange feeling between that of distance and falseness on one end, and a sense of immediacy on the other."

We are pleased to put forward Zach as a recipient of the Lang Award.

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

Student Handbook '04-'05-2.qxd A double major in engineering and religion, Noah Marks is a member of Phi Beta Kappa, Sigma Xi, and Tau Beta Pi. For the last year, Noah served as a research assistant on low-power, implantable biomedical devices. As such, he built a system and user interface for implementing experiments to characterize and test microprocessor systems that utilize radio-frequency communication. He presented a paper on his work at the North Eastern BioEngineering Conference last spring. Last summer, he won a fellowship supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute to conduct research: using Texas Instruments MSP430 microcontrollers, he designed and implemented a system to characterize the robustness of the communication protocol of radio-frequency wireless transponders.

Impressively, Noah maintained an outstanding academic record while participating actively in numerous extracurricular activities and is widely respected by faculty, staff, and students for his maturity and deep commitment to improving campus life. He was a resident advisor for two years, volunteered with Learning for Life, serving at one point as its coordinator, served on the board of Swarthmore Hillel, and was active in the Interfaith Center. He served on a number of Student Council committees, including the Dean's Advisory Council, the Assessment Committee, and the Housing Committee. Noah also served as a "Wizard" for the Engineering Department, and Admissions tour guide, and was a member of College's Drug and Alcohol Resource Team.

This fall, Noah will enter The Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) of America in New York City, one of the world's leading centers for Jewish learning. At JTS, he will earn a masters degree in Biblical exegesis and work toward rabbinic ordination.