Lea-Pearl Njei, biological sciences; Caly Ferguson, mechanical engineering; and Jariatu Kargbo, biological sciences, have each received the prestigious Goldwater Scholarship for the 2025 – 2026 academic year. The Barry Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation strives to promote a strong STEM workforce in the U.S., and Njei, Ferguson, and Kargbo are among this year’s 441 awardees nationwide. Since 2005, 34 UMBC students have been awarded a Goldwater Scholarship.
“Caly, Lea-Pearl, and Jariatu emerged from a field of well-qualified students to represent UMBC in the Goldwater competition,” shares April Householder ’95, director of undergraduate research and prestigious scholarships. “They worked with me and the Goldwater faculty committee to strengthen their applications, and their dedication paid off. For several years in a row, UMBC has had multiple winners for this extremely competitive award.”
Njei is conducting colorectal cancer research with Jean-Pierre Raufman at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, after an internship at Yale sparked her interest in gastrointestinal organs. Njei has found support in the Meyerhoff Scholars program, especially from staff such as Jacqueline King.
“Sometimes I have that fear, where I know I can do something, but I need a little push, or someone to give me that confidence that I can do it,” Njei says. “And Dr. King’s support has been wonderful.”
Raufman, too, “has always been incredibly supportive of me as a young researcher and continually challenges me to grow and reach my full potential,” Njei says.
Njei also appreciates how much assistance she’s received as an international student and the diversity among biological sciences majors. “There are people who want to go to medical school, who want to go to graduate school, and others who want to go into the pharmaceutical industry or engineering,” she says. Njei serves as president of the UMBC chapter of Phi Delta Epsilon, the international medical fraternity. The fraternity offered “another community on campus that, besides seeing myself as a researcher, helped me see myself in the world of medicine.”
The perfect place to grow
Ferguson is developing a prosthetic arm that runs on software driven by machine learning and is also affordable—a tricky combination. His work with Ramana Vinjamuri, associate professor of computer science and electrical engineering, has taken Vinjamuri’s lab in a new direction.
Vinjamuri is “open to ideas,” and tells his students that “the biggest thing you have to do is learn,” Ferguson says. “He’s been an incredible help to me over these past couple of years working on this project. UMBC has been the perfect place for me to grow.”
The project is making good progress, and right now Ferguson is working on a live simulation and moving toward a prototype that other lab members can use in experiments. He’s picked up substantial coding skills from his time in Vinjamuri’s group.
Ferguson is inspired to pursue the prosthetic arm in part because of a birth defect that caused portions of two fingers on each of his hands not to develop. It doesn’t affect his daily life much—Ferguson says he can still type, play basketball, and play video games, for example. “But it got me thinking about people with much bigger challenges,” he says. “Being able to impact that community with technology that I created would be pretty cool, so that’s how I got started with this idea.”
Right at your doorstep
Kargbo is studying melanopsin, a protein in the eye, with Phyllis Robinson, professor of biological sciences. “I singled out UMBC because of its emphasis on community and research—that’s what I wanted out of my university experience,” Kargbo says, and she found what she was looking for. She chose Robinson’s lab because of her interactions with other lab members. “It felt like a really safe lab environment for me to make mistakes, learn from them, and then grow as a researcher,” she says, “even though I didn’t understand that much when I first started out.”
Kargbo encourages aspiring researchers not to sell themselves short. “You don’t know what you’re capable of until you actually try to accomplish your goal,” she says. “And if you don’t have the confidence to show what you’re able to do, nobody’s ever going to know about it.”
All of the recipients agreed that receiving the Goldwater will open up a new support network among current and former recipients, and that the application process improved their communication skills and helped them sharpen their career goals.
“Goldwater is another opportunity for me to practice communicating my science,” Kargbo says. “I can now use the skills that I learned from applying for Goldwater, even if I hadn’t won the award, to apply for other grants, for example the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship for graduate school or Fulbright.”
The newest Goldwater scholars also felt that UMBC offered the environment and resources they needed to succeed. To go after big goals, “You need people who believe in you. You need mentors, you need support groups, and you can and will find them at UMBC,” Njei says. “You don’t even have to look too far, because they are all right there at your doorstep.”
Tags: Biology, CNMS, COEIT, MechE, undergradresearch
