The second annual FredTech STEM 16 Summit brought together more than 350 educators, students, community members and business leaders at the University of Mary Washington on Saturday, April 20.
The day-long event featured seminars on STEM programming in school districts and women in technology, as well as a STEM career panel. The summit also included more than 45 projects from UMW, regional elementary and secondary schools, Germanna Community College, and local and regional businesses and nonprofit organizations. Six UMW offices and academic departments were represented at the summit, including the Department of Biological Sciences, the Department of Computer Science, the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, the Department of Mathematics, the Office of Admissions and a 3D printing demonstration.
UMW computer science student David Peworchik was honored with the “SWIFT Scholarship in Computer Science” Award for the 2013-2014 academic year, which provides a merit scholarship to a top computer science major in the region. The scholarship is funded by the Society for World Interbank Financial Telecommunications, Inc (SWIFT).
In addition, UMW students, Alex Gilley, Zach Goodwin, Jerome Mueller and Russell Ruud , were named as SWIFT Student Research Fellows for the 2013-2014 year. They received funding from SWIFT and UMW to attend the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) conference in San Diego in July. The students will present their part of an interdisciplinary research project in the area of pharmaceutical discovery. Their work with supercomputers and data analysis may lead to new treatments for diseases such as HIV and Tuberculosis, according to 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. In the team competition of the calculus tournament, the team from Paul VI High School in Fairfax came in first place and the team from the Commonwealth Governor’s School came in second place. In the individual competition, Jack Sweeney of Paul VI High School won first place and Lina Hong of Paul VI High School won second place.
In the titration tournament, members of UMW’s honors general chemistry class won first place, followed by senior chemistry majors in second place.
The summit culminated with a keynote lecture by David Kerr, a program lead in the Federal Aviation Administration’s Office of Communications.
