Westport Scholarship Winner Meets With Sen. Dodd
By Andrew Kosow
WASHINGTON, Sept. 25, 2002–Seventeen-year-old Westport native Benjamin Schwartz came to the Capital this week to receive a $10,000 scholarship he earned as a 2002 Davidson Fellow because of a computer program he created that could someday make computers cheaper, bridges safer and buildings like the World Trade Center sturdier.
Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.) met with Schwartz and his parents, Laura and Joshua, at his Senate office Wednesday to congratulate him and talk about his program, AFMetric, which Dodd admitted sheepishly, “I don’t completely understand.”
Seated comfortably on couches in the senator’s office, Schwartz eagerly explained the computer program and how it uses data from an atomic force microscope to accurately measure grain boundary energy with a series of three-dimensional mathematical operations.
“Most materials, such as metals, are not completely solid but built of many large grains stuck together,” Schwartz said to an impressed Dodd, “and my program helps measure the energy at the weakest points in the structure, which are the grain boundaries.” He explained that this would aid engineers and physicists in creating more durable metals and cheaper computer chips and in helping detect flaws in building materials.
“Makes sense,” Dodd said. “Heck, I’m surprised we didn’t have this already.”
Schwartz created AFMetric in an intense five-week period he spent working with Professor Eugene Rabkin, an expert in grain boundary engineering, this summer in a program at the Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa.
At the beginning of the meeting, Dodd jokingly asked Schwartz, now a freshman at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “Why not go to school in Connecticut, why go to school in Boston?”
This prompted a serious discussion about the University of Connecticut’s inability to attract the best students from Connecticut. “They are just not aggressive about identifying the best students in the state,” Dodd said. “Now if you were 6’9″, it would be a different story,” he added lightly, alluding to UConn’s powerhouse basketball program.
“They aren’t aggressive at all,” Schwartz agreed. “I never heard from them.”
Laura Schwartz said that Benjamin had been interested in science “since he was three years old,” and that while growing up, the only television he was allowed to watch were video rentals of shows like “Nova” or the science show “Teacher to Teacher with Mister Wizard.”
“Half of what I know came from Mr. Wizard,” Schwartz said.
Dodd then asked slyly, “So where did you sneak [watching other television shows]?” The Schwartzes laughed heartily.
Schwartz expressed an interest in understanding government and said that someday he would want to be the science adviser to the president because “technology changes foreign policy. Look at the debate now over countries with weapons of mass destruction.”
Dodd promptly extended Schwartz an invitation to work in his Senate office here next summer so he could see how policy is formulated. ” I’m always excited when people express a desire to understand policy and how politics work,” Dodd said.
After the meeting, which lasted 30 minutes, Schwartz said, “That was great, and I am very interested in working for [Dodd] next summer.”
“Ben is an impressive young man – bright and articulate,” Dodd said in a press release. “He makes Connecticut and Westport proud, and I wish him all the best in his future achievements.”
Published in The Hour, in Connecticut.
