Michael Adelman ’10 Awarded Udall Scholarship

National awards go to future leaders in environmental fields; Ben Swartout ’11 and Jennifer Bell ’11 receive honorable mentions

Michael Adelman ’10 (Clarks Summit, Pa.) is among 80 students nationally to be awarded a 2009 Morris K. Udall Scholarship. Lafayette is the only exclusively undergraduate liberal arts and engineering college among the 66 institutions whose students were honored.
This is the second year in a row that Adelman, a civil engineering major and Marquis Scholar, has received a Udall Scholarship. Benjamin Swartout ’11 (Upton, Mass.), a civil engineering major, and Jennifer Bell ’11 (Purcellville, Va.), a geology major, were two of 50 students to receive honorable mentions.

Scholars are selected on the basis of commitment to careers in the environment, leadership potential, and academic achievement. Scholarship recipients receive $5,000 for educational expenses. Adelman plans to attend graduate school and continue his work with environmental sustainability.

Adelman has worked extensively on sustainability projects at Lafayette through close student-faculty research. Under the guidance of Arthur Kney, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, he has helped develop a campus-wide, multidisciplinary composting initiative. Bell has also taken a major role in the composting project. She received a grant from the Clinton Global Initiative University for the project and an organic community garden and presented the research at the Clinton conference held in February.

Adelman also has worked with Kney; Samuel Morton, assistant professor of chemical engineering; and Steven Mylon, assistant professor of chemistry, on a multidisciplinary project to remediate compounds, such as chlorinated solvents, from groundwater.

Adelman’s success reflects Lafayette’s distinctive status as an exclusively undergraduate liberal arts college with an outstanding engineering program. In the spring of 2008, Adelman spent the semester studying engineering and German language and culture in a Lafayette faculty-led program at Jacobs University Bremen. He also is involved with the College’s Economic Empowerment and Global Learning Project (EEGLP), which was saluted by President Clinton at the 2008 Global Initiative University Conference.

An offshoot of work begun by the College’s chapter of Engineers Without Borders, EEGLP brings together students with majors from all four of the College’s academic divisions. The students have helped villagers in Lagunitas, Honduras, to create a sustainable economy by growing coffee, and are working with citizens of New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward, which was devastated in 2005 by Hurricane Katrina, to rebuild the area as the first carbon-neutral community in the country.

See a list of recent Lafayette recipients of national and international scholarships and fellowships for undergraduate and post-graduate study. For information on applying for scholarships and fellowships, contact Julia A. Goldberg, associate dean of the College, (610) 330-5521.