Amherst Resident Receives Federal Fellowship

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Yan Shtarker, a freshman computer science-and-engineering major at UB, has been awarded a highly competitive Energy Research Undergraduate Laboratory Fellowship from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).

Shtarker will conduct his research at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), one of 11 DOE sites participating in the fellowship program. Some 600 undergraduate students applied for the 60-80 slots.

The fellowships provide the opportunity for selected students to work with prestigious scientists in state-of-the-art facilities.

During his summer fellowship, Shtarker will work with Stephen Scott in ORNL's Computer Science and Mathematics Division.

His project will involve developing new software programs for three-dimensional computer visualization.

The resulting software tools will be run on advanced parallel computers. Ultimately, they will be used to design and test new products, such as industrial and pharmaceutical chemical compounds, weather forecasting tools or more user-friendly home, office and leisure computer environments.

A 1999 graduate of Williamsville East High School, Shtarker last year participated in the Summer Workshop on Computational Chemistry, an outreach program for high-school students organized by UB's Center for Computational Research (CCR).

This year, Shtarker has been a student intern at CCR, where he has been developing an administrative database information-retrieval system with CCR scientist Cynthia Cornelius.

Shtarker lives in Amherst.