The Goldwater Scholarship Foundation announced the recipients of the 2020 competition. From a pool of 1,343 undergraduates nominated by 461 institutions, the Foundation awarded 396 scholarships this year. Each institution is allotted four nominees, and this year two students in the department of biomedical engineering at Case Western Reserve University received the scholarship.

Daniel Shao, Junior, Systems Biology (BS), Computer Science (BA), Biology (Min), has been working on bioinformatics projects in the Center for Computational Imaging and Personalized Diagnostics including building a machine learning classifier to predict patient survival from breast tumor images. Evan Vesper, Junior, Electrical Engineering (BSE), Biomedical Engineering (BSE), French (Min) has been volunteering in the Motion Study Lab at the Louis Stokes Cleveland VA Medical Center's APT Center. Evan has also received one of the APT Center's highly competitive Wen Ko Summer Internships. There are a lot of people who just volunteer in the MSL, but not many who receive funding for their summer research experiences. The APT Center Wen Ko Summer Internship helped him to grow professionally and better position himself to compete for the Goldwater Fellowship,

Established by Congress in 1986, the Barry Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Program is designed to attract outstanding students into careers in mathematics, the natural sciences, and engineering. Scholarships are awarded on the basis of merit to students who are sophomores or juniors during the current academic year and who have excellent academic records and demonstrated interest in and potential for careers in mathematics, the natural sciences, or engineering.