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Undergraduate students Brittany Earle and Jeni Sorli have been selected to receive prestigious national Goldwater Scholarships. Only three such scholarships were awarded to CU-Boulder students this year.

The scholarships are worth up to $7,500 and recognize sophomores and juniors who have achieved high academic merit and who are expected to be leaders in their fields.

The three CU-Boulder winners are among only 271 Goldwater Scholars selected from a pool of 1,107 candidates from universities and colleges nationwide.

Earle, a sophomore in chemical engineering, works in Professor Christopher Bowman’s campus laboratory, which focuses on polymerics, developing new materials and mechanisms for many biomedical applications. Earle’s project focuses on a dual-cure polymer system for ophthalmic stents used to treat patients with glaucoma.

She also is active in the CU-Boulder chapter of Engineers Without Borders and traveled to the Ilam district in Nepal last summer. There she worked on a spring source protection system to help protect the area’s drinking water from agricultural runoff. She is a Boettcher Scholar and a member of the Presidents Leadership Class.

Sorli, a sophomore majoring in chemical and biochemical engineering, is interested in renewable transportation fuels and clean energy. She works in the campus laboratory of Professor Alan Weimer, executive director of the Colorado Center for Biorefining and Biofuels, or C2B2.

Her particular research interest is biomass. In the lab she’s worked on a bioreactor that was used to run a series of biomass gasification reactions. She presented the results at the American Institute of Chemical Engineers National Conference in Pittsburgh in 2012. She also is a Norlin Scholar and received the CU Presidential Scholarship.

Congratulations to our excellent undergraduates!