Jonathan Timcheck joins prestigious ranks of Churchill Scholars
Senior Jonathan Timcheck has been named a 2015 Churchill Scholar. He becomes the fourth Ohio State student ever to receive the award, which includes a one-year scholarship for the engineering physics major to continue his high energy physics research at the University of Cambridge in England.
An Honors student and member of the Honors Collegium, Jonathan began conducting high energy physics research as a freshman under the guidance of Professors Richard Hughes and Brian Winer, analyzing proton-antiproton collisions. His work measuring the properties of the newly discovered Higgs boson (as a member of the CMS experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider) was published in the Journal of High Energy Physics, making him one of the very few undergraduate authors on any CMS publication. As a result, he was named a Goldwater Scholar in 2013 as a sophomore.
Jonathan also spent a summer conducting research on graphic processing units in Jülich, Germany, as part of the DAAD's Research Internships in Science and Engineering program. Back in the Hughes/Winer lab, his senior thesis uses Deep Convolutional Neural Networks for signal discrimination in the challenging environment of the 2015 Large Hadron Collider.
"Jon's recent work on applying modern image processing techniques to high energy physics studies is truly groundbreaking," said Hughes, "with the potential for dramatic improvements to both data analysis as well as data collection."
Jonathan has garnered an impressive list of recognitions from the College of Engineering and the College of Arts and Sciences, including the Smith Sophomore and Junior Awards from the Department of Physics, the Valentino Academic Achievement Scholarship, the Walter E. Kidd Scholarship, the Robert Schwartz Award, and the Engineering Experiment Station Honors Undergraduate Summer Research Internship. Outside the laboratory, one of Jonathan's goals is to share his passion for computer science with others, and he has done so as part of the college's Translating Engineering Research to K-8 (TEK 8) program. He also serves as a peer contact for the Undergraduate Research Office and as a tutor for the Department of Physics. In addition, Jonathan is president of Ohio State's chapter of Sigma Pi Sigma, the Physics Honor Society.
Jonathan will pursue a master's degree in applied math at Cambridge, with the goal of enhancing his quantitative analysis skills. Upon completion of his degree, he plans to return to the U.S. to begin a PhD program in physics. Jonathan's ultimate goal is to become a professor at a major university, teaching students and developing data analysis techniques to study fundamental particle interactions in particle accelerator experiments.
Previous Ohio State Churchill Scholars include computer science student Marc Khoury in 2012, engineering physics student Tyler Merz in 2011 and physics student Lawrence Bigler, Jr., in 1967. In addition, Ohio State has a 1978 Churchill Scholar on the faculty, Dr. Robin Wharton in the Department of Molecular Genetics.
Students interested in learning more about the Churchill Scholarship should contact the Undergraduate Fellowship Office (fellowships@osu.edu) or visit the Churchill Foundation's website.
