Three Emory College juniors have won the nation’s top scholarship for undergraduate students studying math, natural sciences and engineering.
Daniel Hua, Emily Huang and Eshan Momin are among 452 Goldwater Scholars selected nationwide. They will each receive up to $7,500 per year toward the cost of tuition, fees, books, and room and board, until they earn their undergraduate degrees.
This year’s winners have made significant contributions in labs and advanced understanding of their fields by co-authoring research papers and helping to develop online tutorials. All plan to pursue doctoral degrees.
They join 53 previous Emory recipients of the award, which Congress endowed in 1986 to honor the late Sen. Barry Goldwater.
“What a wonderful achievement for Daniel, Emily and Eshan — a testament both to their talent and hard work as well as to the community of scholars we have here at Emory in the natural sciences and STEM fields,” says Joseph Crespino, interim dean of Emory College of Arts and Sciences.
“I’m so happy for them, and I can’t wait to see all that they will accomplish in the years to come,” he adds.
Daniel Hua
Hua began pursuing basic cancer research during high school in New York City, inspired in part by losing his grandfather to cancer when he was younger.
Still, Hua entered Emory uncertain if he wanted to pursue research or medicine. He has since conducted hands-on research on cellular immunity at the Emory Vaccine Center and translational oncology with the Merghoub Wolchok lab at Weill Cornell Medicine. His interdisciplinary research also includes applying predictive modeling to uncover cancer-metabolic links at the Emory Global Diabetes Research Center.
Those experiences have come together through Hua’s volunteer work with Emory’s Hospice Outreach, Perspectives & Engagement (HOPE) club. He serves as president-elect of the club, visiting patients and helping coordinate more than 50 student volunteers. As a double major in interdisciplinary studies and biology, he now plans to approach cancer from the angle of both a researcher and oncologist.
“Not until I was working with patients in hospice did I have an opportunity to be part of a major chapter of their lives in navigating terminal illness,” Hua says. “I realize I want to be present sooner and understand how medicine can support patients in their healing and care.”
Hua began his lab work in Emory Vaccine Center Director Rafi Ahmed’s immunology lab in the Emory School of Medicine, studying T-cell exhaustion and the signals that can help restore them.
He expanded from cell mechanisms into tumor models at Weill Cornell. He presented his research at the American Association for Cancer Research national conference, speaking on the metabolic state of tumors that immunotherapies might target. There, he earned meritorious recognition and the Young Investigator Award from the Chinese American Hematology Oncology Network.
His research resulted in his first co-authored paper, published in Cell Reports, and two additional manuscripts currently in review. Hua has also contributed to submitted manuscripts based on his work with assistant professor Jithin Varghese at the Rollins School of Public Health, where he uses statistical modeling and machine learning to understand how diabetes or cardiovascular diseases affect cancer incidence and prognosis.
Thanks to Hua’s experience with hospice and shadowing, he realized some doctors lack training to explain a diagnosis to a patient or family. It sparked his interdisciplinary honors thesis.
He is now working with Emory Palliative Care medical director Tammie Quest to develop a training program to address those gaps. Quest is acting as his advisor while she works with Georgia Bureau of Investigation pathologist Rachel Geller on a new field that she calls palliative pathology.
“I think we are going to innovate a whole new field as a result of Daniel’s genuine interest. He is a catalyst and a visionary in his own right,” says Quest, also the Montgomery Chair in Palliative Medicine and professor at Emory School of Medicine. “He’s just an incredible force. He is going to do great things in this world.”
Emily Huang
You can find Huang lifting weights at the Woodruff P.E. Center at 8 a.m. each weekday, and, if she has her way, dancing at EDM concerts around Atlanta on the weekends.
Both are the sort of physical release the Texas native relies on to balance her intense study of the complex mathematical equations that drive her theoretical chemistry research to expand the field of electronic structure theory. Simply put, Huang works on computational models of intricate real-world chemical processes that have the potential to accelerate breakthroughs in clean energy, drug discovery and more.
“Developing a mathematical theory to describe something physical, using symbols and numbers to describe real-world effects, is exciting to me,” says Huang, a double major in chemistry and mathematics. “There is a bit of a struggle connecting this research to a broader audience, but it is so incredibly elegant to me.”
Huang was near the end of high school, having long planned to study chemistry, when she realized that her love of math made a natural fit for the theoretical branch of the field, which requires quantum mechanics, statistics and computational simulations.
Though Emory’s reputation as a leader in the field drew her attention, the students and faculty in the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry research community became the deciding factor in her choice.
Huang joined the lab of Francesco Evangelista, Winship Distinguished Professor of Chemistry, in her first year on campus and began immediately working on the computational results related to materials before moving on to study compounds of interest to organic synthesis.
That was in addition to contributing to Evangelista’s free online tutorials that taught the foundational concepts of theoretical and quantum chemistry and pursuing additional research with chemist James Shee at Rice University.
At Emory and Rice, Huang has used both application and methods techniques to study and model specific molecules. She is the third author on a paper that developed a correlated sampling procedure to describe small-molecule interactions and implemented a new quantum-embedding procedure that is now being tested.
Her latest project is studying highly reactive molecules — the sort that cannot be isolated, much less stored for use. Her goal is to develop a computational answer to whether the molecules form and what changes happen in the process. Those insights have implications for organic and natural product synthesis.
She hopes to complete that project even as she gears up for quantum materials research funded by the National Science Foundation at Columbia University this summer. She will then decide on a new project for an honors thesis.
“Emily is not intimidated. She is very curious about what she does not know,” Evangelista says. “Being confident about learning is the best, because she is aware of what is possible.”
Eshan Momin
Growing up in Atlanta, Momin heard about Emory’s AI.Humanity initiative just as the AI boom began. He immediately wanted to know more about the program’s focus on the ethical and practical implications of artificial intelligence.
As soon as Momin , a Robert W. Woodruff Scholar with a double major in economics and human health, arrived on campus, he joined theTranslational Laboratory for Cardiothoracic Imaging and Artificial Intelligence led by Emory University School of Medicine assistant professor Marly van Assen.
Inspired by his volunteer work helping perform ultrasound scans at the Mosaic Health Center community clinic in nearby Clarkston, Georgia, Momin first conducted a meta-analysis on imaging-based AI software that validated this software can tackle the time-intensive measurement of CT scans. He also became first author on a paper about the work that was published in European Radiology.
He then developed and validated a novel algorithm for heart failure risk prediction in cardiac CT scans, findings that contributed to five additional publications, while also working on an AI-based analysis of cancerous tumor biopsies in the lab of biomedical engineering professor Anant Madabhushi, executive director of the Emory Empathetic AI for Health Institute.
Momin’s latest biomarker project is an AI model used to identify subtle metrics in abdominal scans that are often impossible to quantify with the human eye but are associated with cardiovascular disease. This project could guide doctors to help millions of patients through early identification of cardiac disease, as well as fatty liver disease and pulmonary hypertension.
“The best part is that these biomarkers we are developing are directly translating into clinical practice,” Momin says. “I am trying to personalize high-level forms of screening so that we can provide accurate assessments to patients in need while reducing health care inequities.”
When not coding, Momin serves as president of the Student Alliance for Health Involvement, connecting Emory students to graduate programs across the country and volunteer opportunities across Atlanta. He also serves as executive vice president of the Student Programming Council, overseeing programming for events such as Homecoming Week and an annual spring concert.
With an eye toward pursuing a PhD in biomedical engineering, Momin is also interested in understanding the costs — to the patient and to medical systems — of developing and adopting such cutting-edge technologies in health care.
He is working with RAD-AID, a medical imaging nonprofit, to determine if his AI biomarkers improve outcomes for patients getting chest scans in rural India. He is also developing an honors thesis to test the cost-effectiveness of his AI tools, in the hopes of spurring updated clinical guidelines and insurance coverage for tests.
“He has a million ideas. My main job is to slow him down, so we can finish project A first because he’s already doing project B, C and D,” says van Assen. “I am very happy we get space at Emory to support students like Eshan. He amazes me every time.”
Learn more about scholarships
Students interested in learning more about the Goldwater Scholarship and other prestigious awards should contact Megan Friddle in Emory's National Scholarships and Fellowships Program in the Emory College Pathways Center.