Nice Guys Can Finish First

Though I won’t be at the Alumni Day lunch on Saturday, February 23, I’ll be cheering “off site” for a church friend who is one of four to get the prestigious Porter Ogden Jacobus Fellowship. It’s the university’s top honor for graduate students, and my applause will be for George Young, who is finishing up his doctoral degree in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. He studies group dynamics in nature (such as the flying patterns of birds) to develop algorithms that can automate biologically inspired robots. 

George shares an office at the E-Quad with his wife, Elizabeth, who also had some recent good news. She has been offered a tenure track faculty position at Rhodes College in Tennessee. The Youngs were married at Princeton United Methodist Church and are both in the Handbell Choir. .

Elizabeth also contributes her talents as an oboe player to ensembles in PUMC worship services and to the Princeton University Orchestra. A National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow who works in the High Contrast Imaging Laboratory she studies advanced instrumentation and imaging analysis for the detection of earthlike planets in nearby solar systems.
Congratulations to them both, and to all four of the graduate fellowship winners. Interesting, isn’t it, that none of the four did their undergraduate degree in the United States. George, who grew up in Kalangadoo, Australia, went to the University of Adelaide. The other winners  went to college in Dublin, Paris, and Trieste.  
The awards luncheon ceremony will be streamed live  from Jadwin Gymnasium. 
 
 
 
 

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