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April 23, 2001
FOUR SUNY-ONEONTA STUDENTS WIN SUNY CHANCELLOR'S AWARDS FOR EXCELLENCE
Four seniors from the College at Oneonta were among a select group of State University of New York students chosen to receive the 2001 SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Student Excellence. David Fyfe, a Geography and History major from Oneonta; Craig Scott, a Biology major from Oneonta; Mitchell Waters, an Economics major from Johannesburg, South Africa; and Lut Wong a Chemistry and Computer Science major from Manhattan, received the award which is presented to SUNY students who gain national or international recognition.
David Fyfe was one of only 22 students nationwide selected for a National Geographic Society internship this year. Last October, he was chosen as a presenter at the Middle States Meeting of the American Association of Geographers, one of the very few undergraduate students to present at the professional conference. Last summer, Fyfe worked as a research assistant on a study of the impact of baseball-related tourism on Cooperstown. An outstanding student and a veteran of the U.S. Army 82nd Airborne Division, Fyfe also worked as a teaching assistant in Geography classes at SUNY-Oneonta, presented his research to the local Sertoma chapter, and served as a driving force behind the SUNY-Oneonta Geography Club.
Craig Scott served as primary author and presenter of two abstracts on bioinformatic analysis of a novel gene at the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology conference in March of this year. At SUNY-Oneonta, he was selected as an undergraduate teaching assistant for a General Biology lab and a General Genetics course. In 1999, he worked on ecology field research as an intern at the SUNY-Oneonta Biological Field Station in Cooperstown. A member of the Omicron Delta Kappa leadership honor society, Scott has
co-authored two professional manuscripts, maintained the College’s computer modeling lab, and served terms as both President and Vice-President of the SUNY-Oneonta Biology Club.Mitchell Waters, who served as captain of the SUNY-Oneonta men’s soccer team for two years, was the first student-athlete in the College’s history to be named as a national Academic All-American last fall when he was selected to the GTE Fall/Winter At-Large Second Team. He was also named to the Verizon Fall/Winter At-Large Academic All-America team for District 1. In November, Waters received the Dr. Sam Molnar Award, the SUNY Athletic Conference’s highest honor for a male student-athlete. A member of the national student-athlete honor society, Waters also served as a senior technician at the College’s computer help desk and as President of the Student Athlete Advisory Council.
Lut Wong was selected to present his work at the Seaway Section Meeting of the Mathematical Association of America last November. As part of a student-faculty research project through the SUNY-Oneonta Teaching, Learning and Technology Center, he helped to develop a java-based implementation of philosopher Charles Pierce’s Existential Graphs. Wong was also a member of the SUNY-Oneonta team that competed in the regional programming competition of the Association of Computing Machinery. As A teaching assistant in Mathematical Sciences courses, Wong has assisted other students with problems in computer programming.
Fyfe, Scott, Waters, and Wong will receive their awards on May 2 at a reception in Albany at the Empire State Convention Center. In the four years that the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Student Excellence has been presented, twelve College at Oneonta students have been named as recipients.
For more information about the College, please call the Public Relations Office at (607) 436-2748 or send e-mail to
Carol Blazina, Assistant to the President.