5/1/2012
 

UW-Stevens Point alumni earn National Science Foundation fellowships

Three alumni of the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point have been awarded funding for graduate research through the National Science Foundation.

Alina Ott, Tracey Oudenhoven and Randall Siedschlag, all 2011 graduates now attending graduate school, were among the 2,000 students selected from across the United States for a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. They will each receive three years of support, including a $30,000 annual stipend, $12,000 cost-of-education allowance to their current institution, international research and professional development opportunities, and TeraGrid supercomputer access.

Ott, a native of Mount Horeb attending Iowa State University, is researching plant genetics. While at UW-Stevens Point, she worked with Biology Professor Devinder Sandhu mapping soybean genes for sterility, exploring meiotic recombination across soybean chromosomes and examining gene expression in wheat brassinosteroid pathways. She received the Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship for a project which mapped cotyledon color in soybeans.

Oudenhoven is a Stevens Point native attending UW-Madison where she is pursuing a doctorate in physical chemistry with laser spectroscopy as her primary research focus. She was actively involved in research with Assistant Professor Jason D’Acchioli in UW-Stevens Point’s Chemistry Department, beginning in her freshman year with the study of hydrogen producing catalysts both computationally and experimentally. She earned a first National Science Foundation Fellowship to study at the University of California last summer, where she employed lasers to study bacteria-killing dyes.

Siedschlag, a Wautoma native, is studying chemistry at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. While at UW-Stevens Point he worked with D’Acchioli developing novel solar cell materials as part of a WISys project. He also worked on a fundamental chemistry project investigating the properties of organometallic molecules. Siedschlag is currently working on developing novel heterobimetallic catalysts for use in energy problems.

UW-Stevens Point has had three previous alumni winners of the fellowship in the last 12 years, including Sarah Orlofske from the Biology Department and Azaree Lintereur from the Physics and Astronomy Department in 2007, and Travis Booms from the Biology Department in 2000.