What drives these two Goldwater Scholars has nothing to do with the award
Sophie Jacqmotte-Parks ’27 wants to make functional prosthetic hands available to those who can’t afford one. Rebecca An ’27 wants to redesign how cancer drugs find their targets. They work in different labs, speak different scientific languages, and are solving problems that look nothing alike. But this spring, both ÃÛÌÒµ¼º½ juniors were named recipients of the , one of the most prestigious undergraduate research awards in the United States.
The Goldwater Scholarship, established by Congress in honor of Senator Barry Goldwater, recognizes undergraduate researchers who demonstrate exceptional promise in science, mathematics, and engineering. This year, 482 academic institutions nominated 1,485 students from an estimated pool of more than 5,000 eligible sophomores and juniors. Jacqmotte-Parks and An were among the 454 selected this year. Since 2007, 11 ÃÛÌÒµ¼º½ students have been named Goldwater Scholars.
Closing the Gap in Prosthetic Access
For Jacqmotte-Parks, a more interesting number is 95%. That’s the share of amputees in the developing world who have no access to prosthetic care. She has known that number for a while, and it has never stopped bothering her.
Her path to the problem started earlier than most researchers. In middle school, her mother pulled her out of school for an exhibit at the Pacific Northwest College of Art. “The first thing I saw when I walked in was really old prosthetics—an ancient Egyptian toe prosthetic,” she says. “And as I’m going through, it’s moving forward in time. I see a $50,000 myoelectric hand constructed for a veteran. I see a rainbow unicorn 3D printed hand for a five-year-old girl that shoots glitter. I could see through the images how much of an impact it had on these people. That one stuck with me—this five-year-old was given not just equipment equal to others, but something better. It doesn’t have to look and work like a hand when it could be more than a hand.”
The question followed her into high school, where she spent a year writing a 5,000-word thesis on the lack of access to prosthetics in the developing world. “I went in knowing people probably don’t have access,” she says. “I left thinking it's crazy how many people don’t.”
Jacqmotte-Parks in the DART Lab with the prosthetic hand prototype.
A Portland native, Jacqmotte-Parks is a mechanical engineering major working in the Design for Assistive Robotics Technology (DART) lab under Assistant Professor Michael Abbott on a prosthetic hand that does something current low-cost devices can’t: hold on. The design uses jamming, a mechanism in which loose material inside a sealed chamber stiffens under vacuum, to create a palm that conforms to almost any object before locking around it. The fingers use a similar principle, with joints that can be frozen in position without requiring continuous tension on the hand’s cables. The result is a grip that doesn’t fatigue the user, addressing one of the primary reasons people abandon prosthetics altogether.
The palm itself is deceptively simple. “It’s essentially a party balloon filled with tiny glass beads,” Jacqmotte-Parks says. “It’s soft when it’s not under a vacuum. You can deform it around almost any object, but when you apply the vacuum, it stiffens and locks in place.” Elegant engineering, it turns out, doesn’t always require expensive materials.
Getting there required more than a few detours. The team of Jacqmotte-Parks, Elias Pedroza ’26, and Nicos Katigbak ’26 spent most of the summer designing with a sheet of latex because they felt it gave them more freedom, but four months in, they realized they could not seal it enough and started over with the balloon.
Jacqmotte-Parks co-developed the project with Abbott, cold emailing him within his first few months at ÃÛÌÒµ¼º½ to discuss research opportunities in low-cost prosthetics. These shared conversations led to the idea of incorporating jamming mechanisms into 3D-printed hands, a project that has become foundational to the newly established DART Lab.
“Sophie is exactly the kind of student you hope walks into your lab,” Abbott says. “She came in with a deep passion for assistive technology already based upon hundreds of hours of research, helped build a project from the ground up, and has grown into a research leader. Seeing her receive this recognition is a wonderful moment for everyone who has watched her work.”
Her ambitions extend well beyond the current prototype. The device still relies on a vacuum pump to trigger the jamming mechanism, which is neither cheap nor lightweight enough for real-world use in the field. Her stretch goal is to replace it with something far simpler. “I want to do the same thing with a syringe,” she says. “You grasp the object, pull a lever, and it triggers the jamming. Then it would actually be accessible.”
That last word carries weight. Through Engineers Without Borders, Jacqmotte-Parks has worked on infrastructure projects in Rwanda, and she sees that hands-on work as inseparable from her research. “It’s great if we have designs and academic papers, but that’s not really having an impact on users,” she says. “I would love to show up with grant money, put a 3D printer and filament in a community, and train someone to use it to help people. Implementation is really important to me.”
Rewriting How Drugs Find Their Targets
The moment a nanoparticle enters human blood, it disappears. Not literally, but functionally. Within seconds, proteins swarm it, coating it in a layer that changes everything about how the particle behaves: where it goes, what it does, whether the drug it’s carrying ever reaches its target.
Rebecca An has a way of explaining this that makes it click. “When you put nanoparticles in the body, they form what we call a protein corona," she says. “If you think of a chocolate-covered macadamia nut, the protein corona would be the chocolate coating.” The nanoparticle is the macadamia nut. The coating is what the body actually sees.
An, a native of Los Gatos, California, approached the question the way she approaches most things: by reading ahead. As a first-year student, before she had joined any lab, she began attending office hours for a general chemistry course taught partly by Professor Korin Wheeler. She came with Wheeler's own published papers, already annotated. Wheeler invited her to join the lab.
“Rebecca had only been in college for a few months, but her questions made it clear she not only understood my research publications, but she was also already making connections and recognizing themes in the work,” Wheeler says. “That was an impressive feat at this stage.”
In the chemistry lab, An analyzes a nanoparticle sample.
The work she’s doing is, by her own description, the first study of its kind. Fullerenes are hollow, spherical carbon nanoparticles that have attracted significant interest in drug delivery because they can pass through cell membranes and carry molecules, including cancer drugs, to specific targets. But until now, the protein corona that forms around them hadn’t been characterized, partly because the particles are so small that isolating the corona seemed methodologically impossible. Wheeler's lab developed new approaches to separate the nanoparticle from its coating. An spent the past year analyzing what’s in that coating and why.
The implications run toward something ambitious. “In an ideal world, we can fine-tune the chemical groups on the surface of the particle so it’s kind of like a built-in GPS,” said An. “When it attracts the right proteins, the body directs it to wherever it needs to go—your kidney, your lungs, wherever.” If researchers can predict and manipulate which proteins attach to a drug-carrying nanoparticle, they could theoretically design carriers that navigate the body with precision, reaching cancer cells while leaving healthy ones alone, potentially reducing the doses and side effects that make aggressive treatment so punishing.
But for An, the research carries a second obligation. “Nanotechnology has the potential to make really big impacts in personalized medicine and targeted therapies that are more humane,” she said. “It’s also important for us to understand the potential impact of these nanoparticles in our environment once we’re done using them.”
Upon returning to campus from a summer of research at the Adolphe Merkle Institute in Switzerland, An demonstrated a level of initiative that her faculty mentor, Wheeler, believes captures her essence. Rather than simply reporting on her experience, she presented the lab with concrete new directions, including a proposal to incorporate porous nanomaterials into their work. Wheeler notes that this specific contribution could represent a novel approach in the field and an interesting evolution of their team’s trajectory.
An is now a second author on a manuscript in preparation. Methods she developed have been formally added to the lab’s protocols. She has presented her work at the ACS Northern California Undergraduate Research Symposium.
“Coming into ÃÛÌÒµ¼º½, I would have never imagined being interested in nanoparticle research or the possibility of continuing this research at the graduate level,” she says. “It kind of caught me by surprise. I wasn’t expecting to enjoy it this much.”