Bridget Popovic, Graduate Fellow
Graduate Fellowship Recipient, 2016
Bridget will complete her Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering and Manufacturing and Design Engineering, along with a Masters in Mechanical Engineering, in June, 2017. She has also earned a certificate in engineering management. She has worked five terms at NASA, two at Ford Motor Co. and one at Boeing. This year she received our Alumnae Women’s Service Award for outstanding efforts that include leading a campus-wide symposium on Corporate Social Responsibility, being president of Relay for Life, Project manager for NU Rocketry Society and head of American Cancer Society regional campus leadership team. She is described by one professor as the “most driven and hardest working student I have ever known, bar none.”
Sebastian Galvez, Graduate Fellow
Graduate Fellowship Recipient, 2017
Sebastian Galvez graduated at the top of his class in 2012 with a BS in Civil Engineering. He will begin work on his MBA at Kellogg this fall with expertise in finance, civil engineering, architecture and real estate. His recommendations were stellar. He is praised not only for his near perfect grades but for his passion to completely understand the concepts he is studying.. After graduation he worked in engineering and construction, as a private equity analyst and a senior development analyst for a major real estate developer in Lima. While at Northwestern, he led a team of eight to Chincha, Peru (his native country) to help rebuild a community center after an earthquake. Inspired by disabled runners when he ran a NYC marathon, he established a running club for visually impaired in Peru which grew to fifty guides and forty athletes in under a year. His career goal is to work in Peru’s public sector in the Ministry of Housing, Construction and Sanitation.
Emma Cripe, Graduate Fellow
Graduate Fellowship Recipient, 2017
Emma Cripe , who will receive her BS in Biomedical Engineering in June, has been concurrently enrolled in the Masters in Mechanical Engineering program since last fall. She will receive her degree in December, 2017. She is Vice President of the Biomedical Engineering Society and a mentor in the Society of Women Engineers. During the summers she has had design and engineering experience studying in Denmark and working at a research and design firm in Chicago. She was a key member of her senior design program for Lurie Children’s Hospital where she helped develop a prototype respiratory pacemaker in collaboration with the Center for Automatic Medicine in Pediatrics. Her professor described the project as “most complex design prototype” he had seen in twenty three years of advising projects. “To have developed a design, built a prototype and tested it in animals within an academic year would be stunning if it were a team of PhD students.” Stacey’s own experiences with injury as well as her experience at Lurie have guided her toward a career in designing medical device.
Stacey Huynh, Graduate Fellow
Graduate Fellowship Recipient, 2017
Stacey Huynh received her BS in Education and Social Policy in March of this year (2017) and will pursue a Masters in Higher Education Administration and Policy. In addition to her strong academic accomplishments, she is founder and President of the Vietnamese Student Association and President of her sorority, Sigma Psi Zeta. She has also received several awards that honor her volunteer work and leadership, including Wildcat Excellence awards. Stacey has interned during the summers in various youth development programs and currently works as an admission counselor in the Undergraduate Admissions Office. She describes herself as a low income, first generation college student who is committed to help others in under-represented and under-served communities.
Kathryn Eckhoff, Graduate Fellow
Graduate Fellowship Recipient, 2017
Kathryn Eckhoff will receive her B.S. in Civil Engineering in June, 2017, with a near perfect GPA and outstanding academic credentials. She will receive her Masters in Structural Engineering in June,2018. In addition to awards and scholarships, she has had internships with engineering companies every year since high school, including this coming summer. For the last two years she has been president of Phi Sigma Pi, the national honors fraternity. She also works for the Civil Engineering Department as a CE scholar and tutor. Her outstanding recommendations cite her willingness to help and mentor students and her interpersonal skills. They also mention her meticulous attention to detail, certainly a plus for a student aspiring to be a structural engineer.
The Alumnae Awards the 2017-18 Alumnae Graduate Fellowships
Click below to read about the 2017-18 Alumnae Graduate Fellows, Kathryn Eckhoff, Stacey Huynh, Emma Cripe, and Sebastian Galvez.
Undergraduate Academic Enrichment Grant Application for 2018-19 due April 1, 2018
Alumnae Graduate Fellowship Description & Application 2018-19
Craig Duff, Curriculum Innovation Award Recipient
Curriculum Innovation Award Recipient, 2018
Craig Duff is a Professor of Journalism in the Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications. He is an Emmy award-winning video journalist and documentary television director, producer and writer, specializing in multi-platform storytelling and solo journalism. Before joining Medill, Duff was the director of multimedia and chief video journalist for TIME. Through his earlier work with the New York Times, CNN and Turner Broadcasting, he earned numerous national awards. Duff’s summer work will lead to the addition of learning experiences with state-of-the-art multimedia techniques across several Medill classes.
“A ‘Medill Method’ of Video/Television Reporting and Production”
Duff will take the lead role in developing an innovative set of online modules to teach video editing and basic multimedia animation within multiple Medill courses. He notes that although Medill faculty members have extensive experience in the news business, “on the video and multimedia side of things, the methods of working on state-of-the-art systems and software have outpaced the knowledge of many of the teachers.” The approaches students learn through their classes, then, often lag somewhat behind current industry standards and practices.
Duff will visit leading news channels, network bureaus, digital outlets, and post-production houses in Chicago, New York, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. He will embed with top editors and will observe approaches to the technical craft of digital journalism. The modules Duff then creates, in collaboration with other Northwestern faculty members and technical staff, will accurately reflect what is happening now at top news outlets. Course experience with this standard “Medill Method” will enhance the success of Medill graduates as they enter professional news or media organizations.
The name of this award was changed in 2019 from Curriculum Development Award to Curriculum Innovation Award.
Richard Gaber, Curriculum Innovation Award Recipient
Curriculum Innovation Award Recipient, 2018
Richard Gaber is a Professor of Molecular Biosciences in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. For many years, he was also the Director of the College’s Program in Biological Sciences, housing Northwestern’s undergraduate major in biological sciences and courses taken by students in many other fields as well. Under Gaber’s directorship, the program undertook a major restructuring of its undergraduate curriculum, funded by a grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Foundation. Goals included earlier and stronger emphases on inquiry-based and interactive learning and on analytic reasoning. Gaber’s work will further enhance the three foundational laboratory courses introduced as part of the general restructuring. “Enhancing Biological Sciences Laboratory Courses using S. commune”
Gaber’s proposal involves enhancements to Northwestern’s foundational laboratory courses in Biological Sciences, a set of three courses whose combined enrollment typically totals around 800 students each year. He is developing a series of projects using multiple strains of the mushroom-forming fungus Schizophyllum commune. This fungus is found on all continents except Antarctica and is thought to harbor more genetic diversity than any other organism. Gaber will visit forests, logging operations, and woodpiles across the U.S. to collect a geographically diverse array of S. commune specimens for use by students in the lab courses.
Students’ laboratory work with S. commune will continue across all three laboratory courses and involve increasingly sophisticated experiments, data acquisition approaches, and analyses. The diversity among specimens will allow each small group of students to analyze their own unique strain, increasing their interest and motivation. Students from different groups will also mate their fungi and perform morphological and genetic analyses of the progeny. They will generate new data and develop and test their own, original hypotheses, while gaining experience working as a team. At the same time, they will learn key biological principles and research techniques and approaches.
The name of this award was changed in 2019 from Curriculum Development Award to Curriculum Innovation Award.