SC
Selene Chew
  • computational mathematics
  • Class of 2016
  • Ithaca, NY

Selene Chew wins prestigious Goldwater Scholarship

2015 May 6

Ithaca, N.Y., resident Selene Chew, a Rochester Institute of Technology student, has been awarded a scholarship from the Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation.

Chew is a third-year student in the computational mathematics program at RIT's School of Mathematical Sciences. As a Goldwater scholar, Chew will receive $7,500 toward her senior year at RIT.

Chew is one of 260 Goldwater award winners selected from 1,206 nominees. The Goldwater Scholarship is based on academic merit and regarded as one of the most prestigious undergraduate honors. It is awarded to students committed to pursuing careers in mathematics, the natural sciences or engineering.

Chew is a member of the RIT Honors Program and a board member of PiRIT, the RIT Association of Student Mathematicians and Statisticians. She plans to pursue a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics and to work on computer vision research questions in industry. She and her mentor, Nathan Cahill, professor in the RIT School of Mathematical Sciences, explore techniques for improving algorithms that cluster similar points and classify regions of hyperspectral imagery. She received an RIT Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship last year and presented at the university’s annual Undergraduate Research Symposium. Last June, Chew presented a poster with Cahill at her first international conference, the IEEE Workshop on Hyperspectral Image and Signal Processing: Evolution in Remote Sensing, or WHISPERS, in Lausanne, Switzerland. More recently, Chew spent her spring semester abroad through the Budapest Semesters in Mathematics in Budapest, Hungary. She studied number theory, abstract algebra, and hypergraph theory/combinatorics, as well as the Hungarian language and Hungarian math education.