Graduate students Thomas Clark, Vasily Pestun, Kellam Conover and Ning Wu were awarded the Porter Ogden Jacobus Fellowship at the Alumni Day luncheon on Saturday. The Jacobus Fellowship provides financial assistance for the final year of graduate study to students whose work displays high scholarly excellence, according to the University website.
Clark, a fifth-year politics graduate student, said he was “honored and very excited” when he received a letter notifying him about the fellowship.
Clark’s dissertation explores the power struggle between the U.S. Congress and the Supreme Court, focusing on the connection between elite-level institutional interactions and representations.
“His findings suggest that the Court is more responsive to political pressure than previous scholarly work has argued,” Keith Whittington, director of graduate studies in the politics department, said in an e-mail.
“Tom is extremely imaginative, totally focused, a remarkable self-starter, and amazingly hard working,” Charles Cameron GS ’81, Clark’s dissertation adviser, said in an e-mail.
After earning his degree, Clark will join the faculty at Emory as a professor.
Pestun, a fifth-year physics graduate student, said he was “really surprised” to find he had won a Jacobus Fellowship.
Pestun’s dissertation concerns string theory which, “broadly speaking … attempts to study all possibly interesting quantum field theories, including gravity, with a hope that eventually one of these theories will be the theory of our universe,” he explained.
“He is very technically skilled, and very talented,” Chiara Nappi, director of graduate studies in the physics department, said in an e-mail. Nappi added that Pestun has won a post-doctoral fellowship at Harvard, where he will start working in September.
Conover, a fifth-year classics graduate student, said that when he received a call about the Jacobus Fellowship the serious tone of the phone call from Graduate School Dean William Russel’s office concerned him at first. “I really thought I was about to be expelled,” he said.
Conover’s dissertation, which examines ancient Athenian attitudes toward and regulation of bribery, was inspired by his stumbling upon a comment in an ancient Athenian court speech in which the prosecutor accused his opponent of bribing witnesses.
“Judicial speeches from Athens are rife with similar accusations of corruption or bribe-taking, yet, this commentary pointed out, no major work had ever been written about the subject,” he explained.
Classics professor Andrew Feldherr ’85 described Conover as the type of student who “will pursue an insight, developing and working at it until he has transformed it into an idea both interesting and profound.”
After earning his degree, Conover hopes to become a classics professor.
Wu, a chemical engineering graduate student, said he was “extremely happy” when he found out about the fellowship.
Wu is interested in electrohydrodynamic patterning of thin polymer films. In his dissertation, he examines the hexagonal and other periodic structures that spontaneously form when the film is exposed to an electric field.
“We hope that our research can facilitate the application of this technology to make electronic, optical, and biological devices more economically,” Wu said in an e-mail.
“Ning is very smart, a fine scholar, and an outstanding person,” Russel, Wu’s dissertation adviser, said in an e-mail.
After completing his dissertation, Wu plans to conduct post-doctoral research and then secure a position as a professor.
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