Students from across the region competed and learned at the second annual FredTech STEM 16 Summit. Photo by Karen Pearlman.
The second annual FredTech STEM 16 Summit brought more than 350 educators, students, community members, and business leaders to the University of Mary Washington in April.
Teams from UMW, Germanna Community College, regional elementary and secondary schools, businesses, and nonprofit organizations presented more than 45 projects. The summit featured a STEM career panel and seminars on women in technology and STEM programming in school districts.
The UMW Office of Admissions and the departments of Biological Sciences, Computer Science, Earth and Environmental Sciences, and Mathematics participated. The College of Education offered a 3D printing demonstration.
David Peworchik ’14, who studies computer science, received the 2013-2014 SWIFT Scholarship in Computer Science. The merit scholarship goes to a top computer science major in the region and is funded by the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT).
UMW students Alex Gilley, Zach Goodwyn, Jerome Mueller, and Russell Ruud were named SWIFT Student Research Fellows for 2013-14. They received funding from SWIFT and UMW to present their part of an interdisciplinary research project in pharmaceutical discovery at the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment conference in San Diego in July. The students will work with the types of supercomputers and data analysis that can lead to new disease treatments, said Associate Professor Karen Anewalt, chair of the Department of Computer Science.
In conjunction with the summit, UMW held a titration competition and its seventh annual calculus tournament. David Kerr, a program lead in the Federal Aviation Administration’s Office of Communications, gave the keynote lecture.