Princeton CBE junior Reha Mathur has won a Goldwater Scholarship for outstanding undergraduates interested in mathematics, natural sciences and engineering. Photo by Jessica Cui
Princeton CBE junior Reha Mathur has been awarded a Goldwater Scholarship, an annual award for outstanding undergraduates interested in careers in mathematics, the natural sciences and engineering. She is one of four students selected from Princeton, among the 413 scholarship recipients selected across the United States.
One- and two-year Goldwater Scholarships cover tuition, fees, room and board up to a maximum of $7,500 per year.
The scholarship program honoring Sen. Barry Goldwater was created as part of the Barry Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation, a federally endowed agency instituted by an act of Congress in 1986. Counting this year’s awards, the Goldwater Foundation has awarded more than 10,000 scholarships.
Mathur, from Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, plans to get a Ph.D. in computational biology or bioengineering, with the ultimate goal of leading a team at a biotech company or starting her own, to translate her research into tangible products.
“My lifelong goal is to improve the quality and accessibility of healthcare around the world by parsing the complexity of biology,” she wrote in her application. “Pursuing translational research at the intersection of computation and biology is the most effective way to accomplish this goal.”
Mathur is the current director of Tigerlaunch, one of the world’s largest student-run entrepreneurship competitions, and the founder of the Princeton Biotech Group, a group of 80 undergraduates interested in biotech. She also received the Shapiro Prize in both her freshman and sophomore years.
Her mentors include Athanassios Z. Panagiotopoulos, Princeton’s Susan Dod Brown Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering; Joshua Rabinowitz, a professor of chemistry and the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics; former CBE graduate student Maria Carolina Nicola Barbosa Muniz; and postdoctoral research associate Daniel Weilandt.
