NSPE-PEC George B. Hightower, P.E. Fellowship

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Fellowship deadline is March 1.

NSPE-PEC and the NSPE Educational Foundation have established the George B. Hightower, P.E., Memorial Fellowship Fund to annually honor an outstanding engineering graduate student.

You, too, can support the future of highly qualified construction minded engineers by contributing to the NSPE-PEC George B. Hightower, P.E., Fellowship today.

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2012 NSPE-PEC George B. Hightower, P.E. Fellowship
Lauren Boldon

This year's PEC Hightower Fellowship winner is Lauren Boldon, a Ph.D student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Nuclear Engineering and Science. Lauren is presently pursuing research into Pyrochemical Reprocessing, a proliferation-resistant method of recycling the uranium from used nuclear fuel. This research would entail extensive computer simulation into the thermodynamics and electrochemistry of such a system. While pursuing her B.S. in Nuclear Engineering from RPI, Lauren worked with a small team on the preliminary design of a pyrochemical reprocessing system, under the guidance of advisors Dr. Emily Liu from RPI and Dr. Jinsuo Zhang from Los Alamos National Laboratory. Additionally, she studied Dynamic Light and X-ray scattering of nano-particles and polymers as a member of Dr. Emily Liu's research group. This work was used to help develop a method to effectively analyze dendrimers, or cancer drug delivery nano-particles, and was recently published as "Characterization of Dendrimers with Scattering Techniques" in the Journal of Polymers.

On campus, Lauren was President of Colleges Against Cancer for three years and a member of the School of Engineering Student Advisory Council and subsequently the MANE (Mechanical, Aerospace, and Nuclear Engineering) Student Advisory Council. She is also a member of the national and RPI American Nuclear Society chapters, the Nuclear Advocacy Network, the Association of Women in Science, the Society of Women Engineers, and the National Society of Professional Engineers. During her summers, Lauren worked as a Nuclear Steam Supply System intern at the Monticello Nuclear Generating Plant, as a Nuclear Analysis and Design intern performing reactor core design, and as a WISE (Washington Internships for Students in Engineering) intern sponsored by the American Nuclear Society and the Nuclear Energy Institute, gaining political insight in Washington D.C. Additionally, her interest in safety regulations led to writing the nuclear public policy paper, "Fukushima and the Future of U.S. Nuclear Energy", which was recently published in the Journal of Engineering and Public Policy.