WEST POINT, N.Y. – The Barry Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation announced that Cadets Justus Gabriel and Nathon Segovia, Class of 2024, earned a Barry Goldwater Scholarship. West Point has produced 14 Goldwater Scholars since competing in 2018.   

 The Barry Goldwater Scholarship Program, one of the oldest and most prestigious national scholarships in the natural sciences, engineering, and mathematics in the United States, seeks to identify and support college sophomores and juniors who show exceptional promise of becoming this Nation’s next generation of research leaders in these fields. 

 About the Goldwater Scholars 

 Cadet Justus Gabriel is a life science major from Beaverton, Oregon. He plans to pursue a career as an army physician-scientist. In addition to academic interests, Gabriel is an active member of the West Point pre-medical and fly-fishing clubs and is a former member of the Army West Point boxing team. He is currently serving as Cadet Platoon Sergeant in his academic year company. Gabriel shadowed physicians with various specialties at Brooke Army Medical Center and Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. At West Point, he is researching molecular processes that trigger toxicity during exposure to biological toxins and the aberrant accumulation of endogenous proteins during Alzheimer’s disease. His work seeks to develop therapeutics to protect the brain from these threats. Gabriel has presented his work at various conferences across the United States. This summer he will work with collaborators at the University of Cambridge to continue his research. As Gabriel progresses in his army medical career, he plans to lead efforts in developing novel treatments for diseases and disorders that threaten soldiers and civilians. Ultimately, his goal is to translate these treatments directly into patient care. 

Cadet Nathon Segovia is a physics major from Mount Pleasant, Texas. In addition to academic interests, he is the Cadet-in-Charge of West Point’s mascot team and is a launch vehicle design member on the army rocketry and engineering sciences team for the NASA student launch competition. Segovia interned at the National Security Agency’s Laboratory for Physical Sciences, harnessing his interest in both theory and application by working on stochastic differential equations for stochastic approximations for optimal control at Los Alamos National Laboratory under the Materials, Physics, and Applications Quantum division by simulating, constructing, and analyzing data on optical traps for quantum technology applications. He conducts research at the Photonics Research Center with a Quantum Information and Science Laboratory team by applying a “first principles” approach to specific open quantum systems to generate a quantitative model for guiding quantum technology experiments at West Point. Segovia plans to expand Latino representation in physics while further developing his research in quantum sensors by emphasizing theoretical physics, notably quantum field theories, and gravity, to help improve quantum technology development. 

 About West Point  

The U.S. Military Academy at West Point is a four-year, co-educational, federal, liberal arts college located 50 miles north of New York City. It was founded in 1802 as America’s first college of engineering and continues today as the world’s premier leader-development institution, consistently ranked among top colleges in the country. Its mission remains constant—to educate, train, and inspire the Corps of Cadets so that each graduate is a commissioned leader of character committed to the values of Duty, Honor, Country and prepared for a career of professional excellence and service to the nation as an officer in the U. S. Army. For more information, go to www.westpoint.edu.