This fall, the Society of Women Engineers awarded 289 scholarships totaling more than $1.2 million to undergraduate and graduate students across the country, including seven Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering students. Earning SWE scholarships marks these students as highly accomplished and motivated students inside and outside of the classroom who will make great contributions to society through engineering. Congratulations to our scholarship recipients!

Tracy Gonce, electrical engineering junior — Chevron/SWE Scholarship
Elizabeth Jones, electrical engineering graduate student — Intel SWE Scholarship
Diana Leon, electrical engineering junior — Chevron/SWE Scholarship
Niveditha Muthukrishnan, biomedical engineering doctoral student — Virginia Counts/Betty Irish SWE for Life Scholarship
Tara Phelps, computer systems engineering sophomore — Chevron/SWE Scholarship
Kellie Phong, electrical engineering junior — Chevron/SWE Scholarship
Tina Sindwani, computer systems engineering sophomore — Chevron/SWE Scholarship

The Society of Women Engineers supports women to achieve and be a positive force in engineering and technology careers. The international organization is the world’s largest advocate and catalyst for change in these fields.

Learn more about SWE at ASU.

Aerospace engineering major Valentin Madrigal.

Valentin Madrigal is an Arizona State University transfer student from Central Arizona College. Inspired to pursue higher education to support his family, in addition to his fascination with space travel, he chose ASU for its renowned aerospace engineering program and anticipates that he will graduate in spring 2024.

As a first-generation college student, Madrigal chose to begin at a community college, as he struggled through high school and had very little knowledge of the American educational system. Coming from an underdeveloped part of Mexico that lacked a public education system, his parents had difficulties guiding him on his educational journey. He admits to having been an unmotivated student in high school because of impoverishment and family circumstances.

Convinced that he would never be able to go to college with his low GPA and ACT score, Madrigal joined the U.S. Army instead. With hard work and dedication, Madrigal is now a Phi Theta Kappa honor student who was able to fund his education using the GI Bill.

He took advantage of MyPath2ASU, a set of customized tools to help create a seamless transfer experience to ASU after a student earns credits or an associate degree from a U.S. community college or university. It allows students to choose from more than 400 pathways into an on-ground or online ASU degree program and have access to personalized benefits that help them navigate the transfer experience. By taking classes that transfer to ASU, students shorten their time to degree completion.

Learn more about Madrigal’s transfer experience.

Copper mine tailings — the leftover rocks, water and chemicals of the mining process — are produced at a very high rate during excavation from mining activity. The displaced material sits idly and is harmful to the environment as it releases particulate matter emissions and leaches acid, heavy metals and even toxic and radioactive material to its surroundings and groundwater.

The Robotic Explorer 10B Psyche team (Psyche-Paths) is a capstone team of ten interdisciplinary students from the School of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering, School of Earth and Space Exploration, School for Engineering of Matter, Transport and Energy and School of Computing, Informatics, and Decision Systems Engineering.

The Industrial Assessment Center at Arizona State University, known as IAC@ASU, conducted its 500th assessment at a wastewater treatment plant in the Phoenix metro area in December.

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Brennan Iannone, an ASU senior majoring in cybersecurity, is the first recipient of the $500 vCISO Cybersecurity Scholarship from Fractional CISO.

“I want to help defend organizations and people from cyberattacks by protecting hardware, networks, servers and data from potential breaches,” Iannone says. “I am interested in analyzing structural risks, engaging in ethical hacking to test for weaknesses, and researching cyberattacks on a high level to identify patterns and develop solutions. I want to keep the bad guys from taking information of innocent people and using it to ruin their names, credit, and lives.”

This scholarship will support and encourage the development of the next generation of cybersecurity professionals. The success of these students is critical in meeting the rising tide of cybercrime. In 2019, the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) received over 1,200 incident reports per day, totaling billions of dollars in losses.

Fractional CISO’s vCISO Cybersecurity Scholarship makes $1,000 in annual scholarships available to selected currently enrolled students pursuing cybersecurity degrees full-time in the United States. A $500 scholarship will also be awarded to the winner of the second contest.

To qualify, students must be at least 18 years old and studying cybersecurity as their major or postgraduate area of focus at any accredited undergraduate or graduate institution within the United States.

Learn more about the vCISO Cybersecurity Scholarship and apply with an essay for the second $500 scholarship by Thursday, December 31, 2020.

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Deepanjan Ghosh, a biological design engineering graduate student, recently earned a 2020 Baxter Young Investigator Award for impactful research on a tissue repair and wound healing technology that prevents post-surgical complications and improves surgical outcomes.

Ghosh is a researcher in the Rege Bioengineering Lab, directed by Professor Kaushal Rege. The lab team works on developing new materials for improving human health, including new methods of tissue repair using nanoscale chemical interactions. Ghosh’s research centers on developing photothermal (light and heat) and immunomodulatory (modulating the immune system) biomaterials for soft tissue healing and repair.

“Although wound closure products like sutures, staples and tissue glues are clinical gold standards, each of them has its own inherent limitations,” Ghosh says. “The need for more efficacious wound closure and repair products is a big research push both in university and industry research labs.”

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Tanner Yorgason, a doctoral student studying materials science and engineering, has won an Idaho National Laboratory Graduate Fellowship, a two-year program that supports students completing their dissertation research.

Yorgason completed an internship with INL in 2018 at the lab facility while working toward a master’s degree and found the experience to be a gateway into the fellowship program.

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It has been about a month since the start of the Fall 2020 semester. Faculty and students all had expectations for this semester, whether it be the first or last or somewhere in between. Here in the graphic information technology program, those expectations are nothing short of being met. The program is already taught entirely online and on campus classes often have an iCourse offering, so this isn’t completely grey water. 

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The Society of Women Engineers has recognized Elizabeth Jones of Arizona State University for her impact on the Society as well as the engineering community with the SWE Outstanding Collegiate Member Award.