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NSF graduate fellowships awarded to four students with Iowa State ties

 

The National Science Foundation (NSF) recently awarded four fellowships to engineering students who have attended or are currently attending Iowa State University.

The students are Catie Brewer, BSCh’07 from Indiana University of Pennsylvania; Katie Pfeiffer, BSChE’06 from Iowa State University; Kristen Pudenz, BSCpE’08 from Iowa State University; and Mike Steffen, BSME&EE’07 from Valparaiso University.

The National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program funds three years of study—up to $121,500—in master’s or doctoral degrees focusing on research in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. This year there were 913 students nationwide who received fellowship awards.

Brewer, from Seattle, is currently pursuing her doctorate at Iowa State in chemical and biological engineering. She plans to use the fellowship for her research on the characterization of chars from the thermochemical processing of biomass. The chars will be used as bio-chars, which are charcoals produced from biomass that are used for agronomic and carbon sequestration application. Brewer is working with Robert C. Brown, Bergles Professor in Thermal Science, Iowa Farm Bureau director of the Bioeconomy Institute, director of the Center for Sustainable Environmental Technologies, professor of mechanical engineering, professor of chemical and biological engineering, and professor of agricultural and biosystems engineering.

“One thing that set me apart from other candidates was my participation in a one-year chemistry and physics exchange program with Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland,” Brewer says.

Pfeiffer will begin her doctoral program at the University of California at Berkeley in the fall of 2008 studying chemical engineering. Since receiving her bachelor’s degree from Iowa State in 2005, she has worked for the drug manufacturing company Pfizer doing small-scale developments of an antibody purification process. She currently works as a process support engineer for Genetech in Vacaville, California.

During her undergraduate work at Iowa State, Pfeiffer researched biodegradable polymers as drug delivery systems with Balaji Narasimhan, associate dean for research and economic development and professor of chemical and biological engineering, and Amy Determan, a former graduate student. Pfeiffer hopes to work on the newly established energy biosciences initiative at Berkeley to develop fuels from cellulosic materials.

“I was thrilled to hear about her NSF Fellowship,” says Narasimhan. “Katie is the fourth undergraduate student that has worked with me to win this award.”

Pudenz is an undergraduate at Iowa State studying computer engineering and will graduate in May 2008. She will use the fellowship she received to research the area of quantum mechanical systems and principles to create a fundamentally different type of computer. Her hope is to explore the field of quantum computing, contributing to efforts to find out how to build computers based on quantum mechanical systems, which will process information in a fundamentally different way than today’s computers. Pudenz, a native of Lincoln, Nebraska, plans to attend the University of Southern California for her graduate degree.

“I feel very honored to be considered worthy of such generous support and am determined to do work that is a credit to the fellowship program,” Pudenz says. “The fellowship will make it possible for me to do the exact research I want to.”

Steffen, from Springfield, Illinois, is currently pursuing his doctorate from Iowa State in computer engineering. He is planning to continue his research in computer graphics architecture. His focus is on developing architectures to improve the performance of ray-tracing, which is one rendering method used for photo-realistic rendering. During his time as an undergraduate at Valparaiso University, he aided in the development of a program allowing the user to control remote equipment in a 3-D stereo-vision virtual environment. From his research lab in Valparaiso, Steffen was able to perform basic move commands on a vehicle located in Japan.

“My goal for my research in computer graphics architecture is to make contributions and improve the realism of real-time computer graphics by moving away from current rendering methods,” Steffen says.

The purpose of the NSF fellowship program is to guarantee the capability of the human resource base of science and engineering in the United States. NSF identifies and supports exceptional graduate students in the appropriate disciplines who are pursuing research-based master’s and doctoral degrees.

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