Goldwater Scholarship Awardee Ross Vasko

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Ross Vasko, a junior honors student in computer science and engineering, has been named a 2016 Goldwater Scholar. The Goldwater is the most prestigious national award for undergraduate researchers in science, math, and engineering. Goldwater Scholars receive an award of $7,500 to cover the cost of tuition, fees, books, and room and board.

Ross is conducting research on flow field visualization with Drs. Rephael Wenger and Han-Wei Shen (Dept. of Computer Science & Engineering).  His work with Drs. Wenger and Shen has been accepted for presentation at this summer’s EuroVis conference in the Netherlands. In addition, Ross spent the summer of 2015 conducting research with Dr. Franz Quint at the Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences through the DAAD RISE program.  Their work on real-time depth estimation of plenoptic cameras was published in Advances in Visual Computing.  Ross has received the Shurtz Award for excellence in first-year mathematics, the College of Engineering Undergraduate Research Scholarship, and the Computer Science and Engineering Undergraduate Research Award.  After receiving a PhD in computer science, he plans to teach and conduct research on geometric algorithms as a professor.

Ross was among four Ohio State undergraduates nominated for the Goldwater Scholarship.  One other OSU student was named a Goldwater scholar and the two others received honorable mention.  Nationally, 252 Goldwater scholarships were awarded to sophomores and juniors on the basis of academic merit from a field of over 1,150 mathematics, science, and engineering students who were nominated by colleges and universities nationwide. An additional 256 Honorable Mentions were also awarded. Each institution may only nominate four students for this award.  Since the award’s inception in 1986, Ohio State has produced 52 Goldwater Scholars; forty-two of the university’s last forty-four nominees have been recognized as a scholar or honorable mention.