Three St. Olaf students earn Rossing Physics Scholarships
St. Olaf College student Daniel Hickox-Young ’16 has been named a Rossing Physics Scholar for 2015–16, and Jordan Dull ’16 and Emily Witt ’17 each earned an honorable mention.
Hickox-Young will receive a $10,000 scholarship from the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America Foundation through the Rossing Fund for Physics Education Endowment. Dull and Witt will each receive a $5,000 scholarship from the foundation.
The award is given each year to outstanding physics students selected from across the nation.
Hickox-Young is a mathematics and physics major. He spent last summer researching spintronics at the University of Minnesota, and this summer he will participate in a research program titled “Optics in the City of Light.” As part of the program, Hickox-Young will spend two months in Paris performing research with a variety of ultrafast lasers. After graduating from St. Olaf, he plans to pursue a Ph.D. in physics or materials science.
Dull is majoring in physics and mathematics. Last summer he worked at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, where he developed a simulation of an x-ray microscope with the goal of better understanding image artifacts. This summer he will perform research in particle physics as an intern at the Argonne National Library. Dull plans to attend graduate school for physics or engineering.
Witt is a physics and Latin major. She spent last summer performing research on the South Pole Telescope Project at the University of Chicago. This summer Witt will work on a prototype telescope for the Cherenkov Telescope Array as part of a research program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. After graduation she plans to pursue a Ph.D. in physics.
Last fall Hickox-Young, Dull, and Witt all presented their summer 2014 research at the Midstates Undergraduate Research Symposium in the Physical Sciences, Math, and Computer Science.
Gifts from Thomas Rossing established the Rossing Fund for Physics Education Endowment in the ELCA Foundation in 2005. The goals of the scholarship program are to encourage top students to attend one of the 27 ELCA colleges and universities in the country, and to consider pursuing physics once they are there. Rossing taught at St. Olaf for 14 years, is a professor emeritus of physics at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Illinois, and is currently a visiting professor of music at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.