Gregory Pope | 1998 Essay | 1999 Essay | 2000 Essays
2001 Essays | 2002 Essays | 2003 Essays | 2004
Essays
2005
Essays | 2006
Essays | 2007
Essays | 2008
Essays
The awardee is a graduating senior who has shown a keen interest in science and demonstrated an outstanding ability to communicate that enthusiasm to a wide audience through journalism. Nominations are solicited from faculty and students in the spring of each year. A committee consisting of Council members and science writers select the winning essay. Applicants may submit original work in any format but it must not exceed 3000 words.
Entry Deadline:
May 15 of each year
Award presented: at Class Day
Prize: $500
In 1998, the winner
was an engineer, Jeff Chapin '98, whose article "Sleepless in Seattle," reported
on the work of four geologists who traced the origins of a tsunami in 1700
along Japan's Pacific to an earthquake in Cascadia. They also predicted re-occurrence
every 410 years, hence the title. Jeff wrote clearly and engagingly, and as
one reviewer commented: "The essay reads a little bit like a detective story,
taking the reader step by step through the scientific process of discovery."
Read 1998's Essay online
The 1999 Prize was awarded to Sulene L. Chi '99 of the Chemistry Department, for her article that reported on MAE Professor Edgar Choueiri's proposal to commemorate the centennial of the Wright Brothers' first powered flight at Kitty Hawk with the maiden voyage of an airplane on Mars.
The 2000 Prize was awarded to Elizabeth Derryberry '00 of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and to Elizabeth Singleton '00 of the Woodrow Wilson School. Elizabeth Derryberry's piece, "A Day in the Field," recounted a vivid personal account of one day during a field trip to identify mountain white-crown sparrows at 10,000ft on the edge of Yosemite National Park. One of the reviewers commented that the author "gives us the kind of details we really want to know about what scientists do, but never seem to get from such accounts - how she kept the birds from hopping out of the nest, what the baby birds looked like and how vulnerable they appear, what it was like to hold such a delicate creature in your hand and prick it with a needle." Elizabeth Singleton's prize-winning entry, "The Biggest Little Cities in the World," is a description of termite mounds, as encountered by the author during her work in Gaborone, Botswana. Her personal discovery and awe over the intricacies of the mounds are cleverly interwoven with a significant amount of scientific information about the development of termite colonies.