Alumnus, senior win Gates scholarships

Two Princetonians, Mateusz Plucinski ’08 and Kenneth Fockele ’06, received scholarships from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to pursue graduate studies at Cambridge University next year.

Plucinski, an operations research and financial engineering (ORFE) major from Warsaw and West Virginia, intends to study computational biology while at Cambridge.

Hugo Simao, an ORFE professor who worked with Plucinski, described Plucinski’s future studies as a “hybrid of math, biology and computer science.”

“He’s very persistent. He doesn’t ever stop doing something until it’s done completely,” Joe Vogel ’08, Plucinski’s roommate, said.

While at Princeton, Plucinski explored a wide field of interests in addition to ORFE. He studied infectious-disease modeling for his thesis and has published several scientific papers. He also studied Portuguese — winning the Lee Elman Prize, which is awarded to the best undergraduate in Portuguese classes — and spent a summer in Brazil working for Embraer, an aircraft manufacturing company.

“He gets excited about problems, and he doesn’t care if they are very difficult or not. He just jumps into them,” said Ignacio Rodriguez-Iturbe, a civil engineering professor and Plucinski’s thesis adviser.

Plucinski served as vice president of both the Princeton Bioengineering Society and the Princeton Operations Research Society. He is also a member of Princeton Aikido.

Plucinski has not yet decided on his future after his year at Cambridge. “It’s a year away … Hopefully my time in the U.K. will help me decide,” he said.

Fockele, however, aims to delve into the world of academia. A German major who began learning German at Princeton, Fockele will be studying Medieval German literature at Cambridge. Afterwards, he intends to return to the United States and complete a Ph.D. before becoming a professor.

“I’m really looking forward to academically having an experience of a different kind of teaching … there’s a lot of freedom there to work on what you’re interested in,” Fockele said.

While at Princeton, Fockele received the Victor Lange Prize, awarded to the author of the best senior thesis in the German department in a given year, for his paper about Medieval German lyric poetry. He also won the the Shapiro Prize for Academic Excellence in both 2003 and 2004. Additionally, he received a fellowship from the German Academic Exchange Service.

When not working on academics, Fockele played club soccer, taught middle school students creative writing through the Arts Council of Princeton and coordinated the University Brothers and Sisters program.

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“He is probably one of the best students I’ve ever had, and he’s probably one of the nicest people I’ve ever met,” said German professor Sara Poor, who was Fockele’s thesis adviser.

Fockele spent his first year after graduating from the University studying at the Freie Universitat Berlin. He spent this past year taking a break from academics and working on temporary jobs like landscaping and tutoring.

Of the 100 Gates Cambridge Scholarships awarded this year, 45 went to Americans. Harvard and Rutgers were tied for the most winners with three recipients each. Princeton has had 21 winners since the award was founded in 2001.