Juniors Bailey Klause and Benjamin Bogart were named 2020-21 Rossing Scholars.
Bogart is one of five students who will receive a $10,000 award and Klause is one of six who will receive a $5,000 award from the Thomas D. Rossing Fund for Physics Education. The awards are made possible through generous gifts from Dr. Thomas D. Rossing, who created the fund through the Foundation of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.
Dr. Luiz Manzoni, chair/associate professor of physics, and Dr. Thelma Berquó, associate professor of physics, both said the award of the Rossing Scholarship to Klause and Bogart is well-deserved.
“Bailey is my advisee, and from the first day I met her I was truly impressed with her maturity and the clarity of her goals,” Manzoni said. “She knew exactly the path that she wanted to follow, namely, to go to grad school in materials science. She received multiple research opportunities/offers, a rare achievement, in that field for the coming summer.”
During the summer of 2019, Klause worked in Berquó’s research group, which gave continuity to a long-term project of magnetic investigation of Al-doped iron oxides. Klause’s contribution resulted in her delivering a poster presentation at the Conference for Undergraduate Women in Physics (CUWiP) at the University of Minnesota in January 2020.
Bogart did research with Manzoni in the summer of 2019.
“Ben truly impressed me,” Manzoni said. “He clearly takes pleasure learning new things and is capable of doing theoretical and experimental work equally well. He also received multiple offers for summer research, in experimental particle physics, during the coming summer.”
Berquó added, “Ben is an overachiever and all experiences I had with him, inside or outside the classroom, were fantastic. Ben and Bailey are self-motived students. Their independent learning and organizational skills will serve both of them well as they continue their studies in upper-level physics courses.”
Rossing, a former professor at St. Olaf College, created the scholarship program in 2005 through the ELCA Foundation. It’s designed to be used for students’ tuition to help ease the burden of pursuing a degree and encourages students to study physics at ELCA schools. More than 120 students have received either a $5,000 or a $10,000 scholarship. The application process for Rossing Scholarships is initiated annually in late autumn.
The ELCA is one of the largest Christian denominations in the United States, with more than 3.7 million members in more than 9,300 congregations across the 50 states and in the Caribbean region.
“Ben and Bailey are extremely nice and humble people,” Manzoni added. “It is a true pleasure to have them in the department and in the classes I teach.”