Goldwater Scholars Share Passion for Research, Scientific Discovery

Benjamin Moran and Hannah Tam have seized myriad opportunities to engage in undergraduate research at Northeastern, both on campus and on co-op. Moran is a marine biology major whose experiences have ranged from labs at the university’s Marine Science Center to field research off the shores of Panama. Tam has explored the building blocks of human movement in Northeastern’s Action Lab and is genetically editing human hematopoietic stem cells on her current co-op.

They are both Honors students in the College of Science, and they share a passion for research. Now they also share the distinction of being named Goldwater Scholars.

The Goldwater Scholarship is a prestigious national award based on academic merit that is given to undergraduate sophomores and juniors who intend to pursue research careers in the natural sciences, mathematics, and engineering. The Barry Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation awarded 240 scholarships for the 2017-18 academic year to students across the United States. Northeastern students Minhal Ahmed, E’19, and Trevor Gale, E’18, also earned Honorable Mentions this year.

“Receiving this scholarship means a lot to me,” says Moran, S’18, who was named a Goldwater Scholarship Honorable Mention in 2015. “It shows a nice track of my progress. Earlier in my career I didn’t quite have a clear idea of what I wanted to do. But from the experiences I’ve had in my third and fourth years here, I have a much clearer idea.”

In his first two years at Northeastern, Moran amassed a variety of undergraduate research experience and earned a Hollings Scholarship from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Over the next two years, he says, a combination of new marine science research experiences has allowed him to expand his knowledge and field studies in areas such as evolutionary genetics and biogeography.