Crisafulli '03, Lieberman '02 named to USA Today top academic teams

Two University students were recently named to USA Today's 2002 All-USA Academic Teams.

Orion Crisafulli '03 and Erez Lieberman '02 were selected to the second and third teams, respectively.

Their achievement was the culmination of a several-month-long application process which attracted about 600 undergraduates nationwide.

The selection committee based its decisions on students' leadership, activities, academics and ability to apply their classroom skills to real-world situations.

Crisafulli is a mechanical and aerospace engineering concentrator with a 3.94 GPA. He is from the village of Kailua on the island of Oahu in Hawaii.

Crisafulli has completed numerous projects during his college career. While researching at the University of Hawaii, he helped discover a new mode of operation for free-electron lasers to increase their power and efficiency.

This past summer he worked on the Princeton's team for NASA's terrestrial planet-finder.

Various universities competed in the project to design a space telescope that would help scientists directly observe a planet outside our solar system capable of sustaining life.

In other projects, Crisafulli has researched organic light-emitting diodes, solved a simplified version of the mathematical Traveling Knights Tour problem and is working on a study of quasi-crystals which might eventually be used in optical control systems and communications networks.

In terms of a career, Crisafulli said, "I hope to be a something of the nexus of public, private and academic life."

A native of Brooklyn, N.Y., Lieberman has accumulated a 3.84 GPA and is concentrating in math.

He has also completed the requirements for two other departments — physics and philosophy — and is currently exploring biology.

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Lieberman spearheaded the grant-writing campaign of a company that devised an economical and environmentally friendly process to cut raw materials in industry.

With the help of the University Math Club, Lieberman started a public awareness lecture series for the community entitled "Infinity Whoa" with student and professor lecturers.

"Sometimes when people are educated in mathematics," Lieberman said, "they are not necessarily seeing the side of math that is the exciting one, the most clever side. They are seeing something very repetitive. Math is really very aesthetic. It's clever, very much like a game."

Lieberman deferred admission to the University for a year to travel to Israel, which invigorated his intellectual curiosity and brought the Jewish faith back into his life.

After graduation, he said he would like to study the application of math and physics to biology. Lieberman also plans to be active in bioethics and is entertaining the idea of starting a school for gifted children.