MIDDLEBURY, Vt.—The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded Graduate Research Fellowships to five recent graduates of Middlebury College: Lydia Beaudrot ’05, Anna Blasiak ’07, Brooke Gardner ’06, Laura Helft ’06, and Tyler Williams ’06.
Arlinda Ardister Wickland, the director of student fellowships and health professions at Middlebury, said five NSF fellowships in one year are the most that Middlebury graduates have received in recent history. Wickland declared it “a salute to the hard work of these five students and a tribute to the dedication of their faculty mentors and advisors.”
Lydia Beaudrot, from Atlanta, will begin pursuing a Ph.D. in ecology at the University of California-Davis in the fall. At UC-Davis she will join the Graduate Group on Ecology to study primate behavior and ecology with biological anthropologist Andrew Marshall. She plans on working in Gunung Palung National Park in Indonesia for her dissertation work, which will likely be on the ranging behavior of gibbons or orangutans.
After graduating cum laude from Middlebury with a joint degree in environmental studies and sociology/anthropology, Beaudrot spent a year in Costa Rica studying capuchin monkeys. In 2006 she began working at Harvard University as a research assistant in primatology where she performed spatial analyses of orangutan movement patterns using the geographical information systems (GIS) skills she acquired at Middlebury.
“Lydia is one of the most sensitive and conscientious students I have encountered at Middlebury College,” said Michael Sheridan from the department of sociology/anthropology, one of Beaudrot’s professors at Middlebury. “She is deeply committed to understanding and working to remedy situations of biodiversity loss and social injustice.”
Anna Blasiak, from North Potomac, Md., is enrolled in the Ph.D. program in computer science at Cornell University where her principal interests lie in graph algorithms and their practical applications, such as networks and computer vision.
At Middlebury Blasiak majored in computer science and mathematics, graduated summa cum laude, earned both departments’ highest honors, and achieved an appointment to Phi Beta Kappa. As a senior Blasiak was on the three-member computer-programming team that finished first among 37 colleges in the annual competition conducted by the Consortium for Computing Sciences in Colleges, Northeast Region. In addition, she won the Dr. Francis D. Parker ’39 Mathematics Prize and the Hazeltine-Klevenow Memorial Trophy for excellence in academics and athletics.
Daniel Scharstein, associate professor of computer science, said Anna is “an extraordinary young woman—multi-talented, intelligent, and independent. …What truly differentiates her, however, is her amazing quest for knowledge and understanding. Unlike many other outstanding students, Anna is not primarily motivated by grades, but she pursues her studies out of a love of learning, is not afraid to take intellectual risks, and tenaciously pursues difficult subjects until she completely understands them.”
Brooke Gardner, from Moss Beach, Calif., is a second-year Ph.D. candidate in the Tetrad program of the biochemistry department at the University of California-San Francisco. She is studying the activation of the unfolded protein response in S. cerevisiae, the organism commonly known as budding yeast, in Professor Peter Walter's laboratory.
Gardner majored in biochemistry at Middlebury, graduated summa cum laude, earned high honors from the department, and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. In the lab at Middlebury she studied a particular protein produced by the bacterium that causes Lyme disease. She cloned the gene for the protein, produced it in large amounts, and was able to partially characterize it.
Her advisor, teacher, and research director at Middlebury was Professor Robert Cluss from the chemistry and biochemistry department. In recommending Gardner for an NSF fellowship, he wrote: “Brooke is eager to learn and was a joy to mentor. Her mind is continually churning; critically evaluating her data, reading the literature, or planning the next experiment.” Cluss said her “willingness to challenge her peers and defend an alternative position was evident [in his first-year seminar on biological and chemical weapons], and became a hallmark of her career at Middlebury.”
Laura Helft, from Hoosick Falls, N.Y., is a second-year graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the cell and molecular biology program. A Ph.D. candidate, she is doing research in the department of plant pathology in the lab of Professor Andrew Bent. Her project focuses on a receptor that allows plants to perceive the presence of bacteria and mount immune responses just as the human body does when it recognizes a pathogen.
A magna cum laude graduate of Middlebury with departmental honors in molecular biology and biochemistry, Helft showed promise as an undergraduate in the pursuit of a research career that can have a significant impact on human health. At Middlebury her thesis attempted to define the mitotic role of a recently cloned gene from the Hei10 family, a family that has been implicated in cancer progression. In her molecular genetics class, Helft successfully cloned and disrupted the luxS gene from Streptococcus mutans, the principal causative agent of human dental decay.
“Laura is confident and willing to undertake difficult tasks” and “a natural leader [in the laboratory] in the sense that people are attracted to her not just by her personality but also by the confidence with which she approaches her work,” said Jeremy Ward, assistant professor of biology at Middlebury and Helft’s thesis advisor. “Supporting Laura will have the broader impact of nurturing and promoting a very talented woman who will no doubt serve as a role model for others.”
Tyler Williams, from Kalamazoo, Mich., will enroll in the fall at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in a Ph.D. program in economics. His principal areas of interest are experimental and behavioral economics through applications in development economics and, more generally, applied microeconomics.
At Middlebury, Williams majored in economics (highest honors) and mathematics (high honors), graduated summa cum laude, and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. In his senior thesis in the economics department, Williams pointed out that there are many theories of microcredit but barely any credible tests of the theories, so he conducted field experiments of his own to address some of the shortfalls in the empirical microcredit literature. (Microcredit is popular in developing countries; it is a small loan extended to an impoverished person for a self-employment project designed to generate income.)
Jeffrey Carpenter, Williams’ thesis advisor at Middlebury and an associate professor of economics, said his student’s research resulted in “the first direct evidence of the ability of peer monitoring to control moral hazard in microcredit programs.” Carpenter called Williams one of his finest students in many years, saying “Tyler is intelligent, conscientious, and humble …with a native sense for a good research idea.” In the year between Middlebury and MIT, Williams honed his analytical skills in applied economics by working as a researcher at the Federal Reserve Bank in Boston.
The National Science Foundation is an independent federal agency that was created by Congress in 1950 to promote advances in science, technology, mathematics, and engineering. The Graduate Research Fellowship Program of the NSF provides three years of financial support for post-baccalaureate students who show exceptional promise in the early stages of their graduate work.
In 2008 the NSF awarded 913 Graduate Research Fellowships of up to $40,500 per year for three years. Fellowship applications were read and evaluated by more than 500 experts in the fields supported by the NSF. Previous graduate research fellows include 20 Nobel laureates, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, Northwestern University social psychologist Jennifer Richeson, and University of Chicago economist Steven Leavitt.