The National Science Foundation awarded Rhodes College $650,000 to increase the academic and career success of lower-income, academically talented STEM students at Rhodes. The eighteen students selected will receive a scholarship to reduce, or even eliminate, their need for federal student loans, participate in a new course on applications of computational thinking and a science-focused first-year writing seminar together, engage in grant-funded summer research experiences, live together in a designated residence hall, and receive peer mentoring.

Students continue to win national awards after they have graduated from Rhodes. McKenna Davis ’18, a physics and mathematics alumna, won the Goldwater Scholarship in 2017 when she was a junior. Now as an aerospace engineering graduate student at UCLA, she has won the highly competitive fellowship.

Using cutting-edge technologies in robotics, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence, students in Dr. Ross Sowell’s Human-Robot Interaction course and Dr. Betsy Sanders’ Virtual Environments course showed off their computer science skills at an end-of-year exhibition of class projects. 

Dr. Brian Larkins, assistant professor of computer science, serves as faculty advisor, but he says Kathleen Blanck ’18 was instrumental in filling the petition for the establishment of a chapter and spending a year of gathering the appropriate documents, information, and funding as part of the application process.

A computer science major, he is founder of tech marketing and education startup Augseption. His talk will focus on how he has been working with schools in Shelby County to promote the adoption of virtual and augmented reality in classroom curriculums.

Katy Smith, mathematics major from Virginia Beach, VA, was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the United States Marine Corps in a ceremony on campus Dec. 15.

After graduating with a degree in computer science at Rhodes College, Steve Ash ’06 earned an M.S. and Ph.D. and now works at Amazon in Seattle. He recently was one of sixty-five professionals who participated in the Tegan and Sara Foundation's Queer Health Hackathon, one example of his belief that technology can be used for good.