National Achievements

The brightest stars visible in the sky are often those closest to us. That’s an apt way to describe ARCS member Sandra Matteucci, who has been honored with the inaugural “Luminary Award.” Presented at the National ARCS board meeting in early June, the award recognizes Matteucci’s exceptional service to the National...

Butterflies are more beautiful and unique than we know. Sofia Sheikh, an ARCS Illinois Scholar, knows this firsthand and it’s why she studies them for her PhD in ecology and evolution.

At the University of Chicago, Sheikh performs genetic manipulations on butterflies as she hunts for the reasoning behind gene co-option...

Saliva is the key to digestion. It moistens the mouth and protects the gums and teeth. Perhaps the most interesting thing it does, however, is contain the essence of a person’s genetics. Paul Maier, a population geneticist at FamilyTreeDNA and former ARCS San Diego Scholar, says a small sample of saliva...

Advances in science are personal to ARCS member Linda Burke. She has learned firsthand since second grade that unless a hearing problem is correctly identified, you can’t fix it. But years later, when you can finally hear on a more normal level, medical and technological advances are “pretty amazing.”

Despite less...

If you are planting your vegetable garden this month, your goal may be enough tomatoes for a yummy sauce, or extra beans to freeze. But the scientists at Inari, based in Massachusetts, think more globally about seeds. ARCS Scholar alumna Kali Brandt, a scientist in plant cell biology at Inari...

“If you can’t smell anything, that’s the best” is a saying that circulates the atmospheric science community. Coty Jen, ARCS Minnesota Chapter Scholar Alumni and current professor at Carnegie Mellon University, joined this community once she chose to use her degrees in chemical and mechanical engineering to study atmospheric particles. What...

Professor Donald Falk became interested in fire “because I saw fire as a big, powerful, scary process. If we get that wrong, we end up with a lot of degraded habitats,” he explains.  His career started with studying rare plant species but has evolved to a focus on ecosystem conditions, drought...

ARCS Scholar Alumni Shadi Sami is the Principal Civil Engineer for the largest capital improvement program in the City of Poway, CA. – a $70-million water improvement program. The decision and commitment to upgrade the system and bring it up to today’s industry standards “is a big deal for Poway,” Sami...

Aniruddha Deshpande, a second-year ARCS Atlanta Scholar, is a student of epidemiology at Emory University working to discover the health impacts of climate change. As the Earth gets warmer, it’s more than melting glaciers and untamed wildfires. It’s also about the future of our society’s health. Ani is building quantitative models...

Christian Moore, a current Atlanta Chapter ARCS Scholar, applied for an open position at the Morehouse College computer lab and it led to him making a digital tool that shows the impact of climate change. With the data visualization map he and his team created on Palantir’s website, the state of...