2023 APAM Senior Award Winners
Professor Marc Spiegelman, Chair of the APAM Department, presented awards to three outstanding seniors at the 2023 APAM Senior Dinner and Award Ceremony. Each winner was selected by the APAM faculty in recognition of their excellent academic achievements.
Applied Physics Faculty Award: David Qian Liu
This year, our Applied Physics Faculty Award winner is an excellent student in a superb class of applied physics seniors. The award winner took many challenging courses in Applied Physics with A’s and A+ in many of his courses. Prof. Venkataraman in particular, praised their performance in Quantum Physics of Matter (and she has very high standards). In addition to courses, our award winner has been heavily involved in research at Columbia, working with Prof. Nanfang Yu on a DARPA research project on creating novel night-vision goggles using nonlinear upconversion in resonant metasurfaces. David helped elucidate the image formation properties of the night-vision goggles by deriving a “nonlinear Snell’s law”, which basically predicts that when converting an infrared scene to one that is visible to our eyes, the scene will be demagnified and distorted. This is an important new result and, hopefully, one of many as our award winner will continue his studies as a Ph.D. student here at Columbia in Applied Physics.
Applied Mathematics Faculty Award: Sadi Gulcelik
Our winner this year is a dedicated and talented graduating senior, with a wealth of experience and accomplishments. He currently holds a 4.08 GPA with 145 points and is an inveterate problem solver. His senior seminar project team successfully extended and tested the “Gravitational Model” of International migration, using advanced Bayesian methods and low-dimensional embedding techniques to visualize their results in Python. Moreover, they correlated migration patterns with the Economist's Democracy Index, adding another layer of complexity and depth to their analysis. This insightful, creative, and challenging project exemplifies this major's dedication to pushing the boundaries of knowledge and making a meaningful impact in their chosen fields. Having lived and worked between Turkey and the US, he is now poised to join Bridgewater after completing his degree at Columbia. In addition to his new role, he will be pursuing a part-time MS Express in Computer Science at Columbia to further enhance his skills.
Rhodes Prize in Materials Science: Liam Andrew Hayes
This year’s awardee is a polymath, working on a dual degree program (4+1) with a BS in materials science and BA in the college in Archaeology where they hope to make an impact at the intersection of both fields. In preparation, they did their senior design project with the Kawashima Group in the Department of Civil Engineering on concrete, both a significant source of CO2 to the atmosphere and critical in mitigating climate change (as well as being a mainstay of future archaeology). They will be returning to Columbia in the Fall to finish the Archaeology Degree at Columbia College and will likely be applying to graduate school in Fall 2024 where their combined expertise in Materials Science and Archaeology will make them extremely competitive.
