Issue of
April 15, 1998

Eight undergraduates honored with Deans' Award for Academic Achievement

Eight Stanford students were honored with the 1998 Deans' Award for Academic Achievement at a reception held Tuesday, April 7, in the Mitchell Earth Sciences Building.

The award, now in its 11th year, is given to extraordinary undergraduates for intellectual accomplishments. Nominations are submitted by faculty and staff members, and winners are chosen by a committee established by the deans of the three schools that offer undergraduate degrees ­ Earth Sciences, Engineering, and Humanities and Sciences.

The award was created in 1988 by Thomas Wasow, professor of linguistics, during his service as dean of undergraduate studies.

Each award winner received a copy of the citation read at the

ceremony, a certificate and a specially selected book with a personalized bookplate.

The eight 1998 Deans' Award winners follow:

• Jhumki Basu, of Saratoga, a senior majoring in human biology, has devoted much of her academic and service activities to the welfare of children. She was one of the main organizers of the 1996 You Can Make a Difference Conference, which focused on children's issues, and during her overseas study in Moscow she conducted a study of the growing number of children who live and work on the streets of Moscow. UNICEF later invited Basu to develop a proposal for a program to address health needs of street children in Moscow.
  
  
• Mark Bell, of Atlanta, a senior majoring in history, has specialized in astronomy and religious studies research. Bell has been a visiting astronomer at the Maria Mitchell Observatory in Massachusetts, where he addressed galactic formation theories, and with funding from a National Science Foundation grant he carried out spectroscopy and photometry analyses on data from telescopes in Hawaii and Europe. Bell's reassessment of Samuel Hill's theory on Protestant Christianity in Bartow County, Georgia, is expected to be published in the Journal of Southern Religion in June.
  
  
• Sunil Gandhi of Stanford, a senior with an individually designed major in integrative neuroscience, has made a significant breakthrough in studying the effects of attention on visual brain centers. In his senior honors thesis, Gandhi used functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure brain activity in human subjects while they shifted their attention, without moving their eyes, to different locations in a visual stimulus.
  
  
• Heidi Hau, of Los Altos, a senior majoring in English and minoring in music, has been active in national and international piano competitions. Hau's performance highlights include earning first prize at the French Piano Institute in July 1996, where, as the youngest participant, she gave a solo recital. Invited to the 1997 Holland Music Sessions, she studied with internationally renowned piano professors and performed throughout Holland.
  
  
• Allison Himmel, of Darien, Conn., a senior majoring in biological sciences, was awarded a Howard Hughes Medical Institute fellowship last summer to study synaptic actions of anesthetics and received national recognition for these studies, which culminated in preparation of a paper as first author. She also submitted an abstract to the Society for Neuroscience and presented her findings at its annual meeting last fall. Himmel is currently preparing abstracts for both the Society for Neuroscience and the American Society of Anesthesiologists meetings this fall. She will be a co-author on at least two additional manuscripts.
  
  
• Alexander Maloney of Baltimore, a senior double majoring in mathematics and physics, was recognized for his work in astrophysics. His research has focused on energy production in quasars, the brightest extragalactic sources in the universe, which is one of the outstanding problems in astrophysics and cosmology. Maloney has prepared a sophisticated statistical analysis of combined data on quasars from several surveys with different source selection criteria.
  
  
• John Maurer of St. Louis, Mo., a junior majoring in music and biological sciences, completed a project that combined basic signal processing research and musical expression. In a one-quarter period, he taught himself the basics of underwater acoustics, recording and measuring the impulse response of DeGuerre pool, simulating its transmission and reverberant properties, composing a demonstration piece of music and floating a successful proposal for this year's research. He has continued his research at Hopkins Marine Station, realizing an Undergraduate Research Opportunities grant in computer modeling of underwater acoustics. As a composer, he debuted a piece at the annual New Music Marathon in San Francisco; concert works are chosen by a jury of professionals.
  
  
• Robert Neel of Hanover Park, Ill., a junior majoring in mathematics, was recognized for his role in research with Robert Finn, professor emeritus of mathematics. For the past year, the pair has been working jointly on a mathematical question that arises in capillarity theory and which derives from problems of fluid management in microgravity. Neel and Finn are now preparing a joint paper, "Singular solutions of the capillarity equation," which they will submit to a major research journal for formal publication. SR