Sam Reiter ’27 and Amir Etemadi ’27 receive prestigious Goldwater Scholarships

This spring, Sam Reiter ’27 and Amir Etemadi ’27 were selected as Goldwater Scholarship recipients! 

The goal of the Goldwater Scholarship — as established by the Goldwater Foundation, an independent federally endowed agency — is to identify, encourage, and financially support outstanding undergraduate students interested in pursuing research careers in the sciences, engineering, and mathematics. This year, it honors over 1,000 students, awarding them an amount equal to the cost of tuition, mandatory fees, books, and room and board, minus the amount of support provided for by other sources, up to a maximum of $7,500 per full academic year. 

Partnering with the Department of Defense, the Goldwater Scholarship seeks to continuously support the development of scientific talent for the betterment of American research, healthcare, and society. It remains one of the most prestigious awards for undergraduates in STEM fields, allowing them to access a wide network of earlier recipients.

Reiter and Etemadi, although coming from different academic backgrounds, both spoke about their excitement for future post-graduate opportunities supported by the scholarship and passion for research experiences that motivated them to apply. The application for the scholarship is centered around a research essay covering previous work and future education goals.

Reiter, a mathematics and computer science double major, applied for the Goldwater Scholarship in order to pursue more exposure to his interests and unlock further opportunities in graduate school and post-college in general. Getting recognition for his current undergraduate research work is a priority, as he hopes to advance these topics after graduating from Carleton. Reiter discussed his research experience, both at Carleton and through his study abroad program with the Budapest Semester in Mathematics (BSM) in Fall 2025, which made up the body of his application. He worked independently with Professor Pál Zsámboki on a mechanistic interpretability project. He got involved through Zsámboki’s Deep Learning course, where he put out a call for research assistants at the beginning of the BSM program. Reiter was interested because the topic spoke to his primary interest: “mathematics applied to other fields.”

“Basically, it’s exploring how large language models [LLMs, often just referred to as AI] work, but from a geometric or quantitative understanding side, rather than blindly pushing to build bigger models,” Reiter said. “What is their thought process, and how do we train them?”

He moved into describing the interpretability project in more depth. 

“We built this tiny little model that had only around 100 weights,” he said, “basically to detect if there was a win in a game of tic-tac-toe.” 

An LLM’s size is determined in part by its number of “weights,” which store information and drive the “thought processes” happening in the model’s nodes.

“You’d give it a tic-tac-toe gameboard and have the model check if there’s three X’s or O’s in a row anywhere on the board,” Reiter explained. “We built that model, and the whole rest of the semester was looking into how that model works mathematically — What has it learned? How did it learn it? And why is that important?”

Reiter’s research focused on trying to derive the smallest possible model in terms of the number of weights that could solve a given task, and how “thought processes” shifted between nodes as weight counts were reduced.

Reiter also spoke about his mentor at Carleton, Assistant Professor of Mathematics Kate Meyer ’09, who he did research with the prior summer. Working with Meyer then helped lay the infrastructure for his future endeavors. 

“It prepared me for how to do research and how to be kind of independent, in that she guided me a little, but more so she helped me understand what to expect out of research,” he said. “I had never sat down and read a math-CS paper before, and Kate helped me develop that skill as I moved into mathematics literature.” 

This summer, Reiter will be taking a new approach to the intersection of math and computer science with an internship opportunity in cell biology, using graph theory to develop tools and structures to predict chemical reactions in cells with artificial intelligence. 

Through the depth and breadth of research Reiter has worked on during his time at Carleton, he has refined his interests and cemented his goals for graduate studies in math and computer science. He is looking forward to how the Goldwater Scholarship will help support these goals, and allow him to continue pursuing the disciplines he is most interested in. Based on his own process developing his research niche and academic goals, Reiter offered advice for other students on a similar journey. 

“The world is changing,” he said. “Don’t do something just because you think you should. Do something because you like it. You’ll find a way forward, because if you think you should do it, quite honestly, in five years, you might regret it if you don’t.”

Etemadi, a biology major with a minor in biochemistry, found the Goldwater Scholarship while trying to learn more about career paths for students of medicine in higher education. He applied through the Goldwater Ambassadors Match Program, which paired him with a student who had already received the scholarship. He hopes to pursue a MD/PhD after Carleton as a physician-scientist in clinical and translational sciences, transforming technical findings from a lab setting into understandable patient-side conversations.

As he has developed his research niche, Etemadi has gravitated toward this intersection of medical research and community involvement, and discussed how these interests have played out in his various experiences. The interdisciplinary nature of the physician-scientist field, with a concentration on otolaryngology (also known as ear, nose, and throat, or ENT), was the focus of his application for the Goldwater Scholarship. 

“I led mouse model research twice, in both the summer and the winter, looking at the aberrant mitochondrial fusion promoter, [a molecule called] M1,” Etemadi explained. “I pioneered a protocol to be used in mice. M1 went from c. Elegans (a common model organism in biomedical research) to the mice in this lab. I was exploring whether this molecule could promote hearing balance and restore aging within mice, and hoping it could translate to humans.”

He elaborated on his people-facing interests as well, which he pursued in clinical work during later summers and in the course ENTS 180: Community Engagement and Qualitative Methods at Carleton, taught by Roger Faust ’19, postdoctoral fellow in environmental studies.

Etemadi discussed how he developed a focus on emancipatory research, which centers “the actual participants, and [allows] vulnerable populations to take the lead and have the whole study driven by their point of view.” Faust’s course further strengthened Etemadi’s desire to focus on research that is not only scientifically meaningful, but also gives back to a community and helps them improve their health. 

“In graduate school, I’m interested in taking population health data and making democratized solutions that can help on a broad scale and ultimately reduce the medical disparities faced by racial and ethnic minorities in poverty, concentrating in ENT sciences,” he said. “So pursuing the PhD, I would say I envision a mixed-methods approach as a researcher now, where I’m taking both the social determinants of health and combining it with the biochemistry that I understand — like what drives hearing loss, head and neck cancer, and vocal fold paralysis. Eventually, I hope to be a professor of otolaryngology.”

“My interest in otolaryngology came through the lens of being a patient,” Etemadi added. “After years of severe respiratory illness and medical insurance being denied, I underwent ENT surgery in Minnesota. Experiencing that transformation firsthand inspired me to better understand the biological mechanisms underlying these diseases, as well as the structural and systemic barriers that prevent equitable access to effective care.”

Etemadi is looking forward to building connections with like-minded physician scientists in the Goldwater Scholar community, as the mentorship of others in his field has been vital in helping him drive this development process.

As well as Faust, Etemadi cites Rika Anderson ’06, associate professor of biology and his major adviser, as a significant mentor who has pushed him to continue to explore his love for research ever since they met through Carleton’s FOCUS program.

“Every year, we did a science night at Greenvale Elementary School teaching kids science, which really fostered my love for teaching, and mentoring the next generation of scientists,” he said. 

In terms of advice for students interested in the scholarship or similar opportunities, Etemadi focused on ensuring his personality and values shone through in application materials. 

“It’s a very long process, but if you’re really committed to a career as a scientist and a researcher, it could be very rewarding,” he said. “The biggest piece of advice I have is to reach out to your mentors. Get those eyes and feedback on [your application]. And on top of that, just be you… I believe simply being your true and authentic self, in the end, pays dividends.”