News

The 2026 Eagle Award Celebration, attended by members of the ARCS® Metro Washington Chapter (ARCS MWC) and other ARCS chapters, donors, Scholars, Scholar Alums, and guests, was held on May 1 at The Army and Navy Club in Washington, DC.

The Honorable Deborah Wince-Smith, Founder and CEO of the Council on...

ARCS MWC Membership hosted a New Member Orientation on Fri, Apr 10 at the home of Jane Riddle. New members who have joined in the past three years gathered for social time and then an orientation to the ARCS MWC councils and committees, including time for Q&A. Huge thanks to co-VP...

Nicole Crumpler – Michelle & Julian Francis Scholar
1st Year Scholar, PhD candidate

Physics and Astronomy
Johns Hopkins University

Research: 
My research combines theoretical physics and observational astronomy to explore unknown physics, such as dark matter and quantum gravity, by using black hole mergers and white dwarf stars to search...

Clara Stahlmann Roeder O’Connor – MWC Chapter Scholar
1st Year Scholar, PhD candidate

Biology & Biomedical Engineering
University of Virginia

Research: 
My research studies how age and prior social experience affect the perception and response to social environments, focusing on fighting behavior in the long-lived forked fungus beetle, including how...

Dear ARCS MWC Members,

What a month it's been! We began with a wonderful New Member Orientation, where 15 new and current members gathered for an engaging evening. Hilary Sparrell (co-VP Membership) provided an excellent overview of the ARCS MWC mission, our university partnerships, chapter structure, and calendar.

We also...

Darrian Mills – MWC Chapter Scholar
1st Year Scholar, PhD candidate

Physics
Georgetown University

Research: 
My research focuses on developing a flexible skin patch that uses microfabricated heaters for the creation of micropores in the skin, enabling painless and non-intrusive drug delivery directly into the body.

How Will Your Research...

Isaac Bilsel – MWC Chapter Scholar
1st Year Scholar, PhD candidate

Electrical & Computer Engineering
George Washington University

Research: 
To accelerate graph neural network inference, my work analyzes communication bottlenecks arising from high-degree graph vertices and introduces a novel on-chip network to efficiently support their collective communication patterns.

How Will...

Dear ARCS MWC Members,

We were pleased to host our Winter Membership Meeting at the Riverbend Club, where more than 70 members and guests gathered for an afternoon with Retired United States Supreme Court Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy. Justice Kennedy spoke about his recent memoir, Life, Law and Liberty, offering...

Alexander “Sasha” Frolov – Patsy Mote Memorial Scholar
1st Year Scholar, PhD candidate

Cybersecurity
University of Maryland

Research: 
I work in cryptography, which is the mathematical study of secure communication and computation. My research focuses on making cryptographic systems faster and more capable. I currently work with zero-knowledge proofs, which...

Nikita Sivakumar – Global Autoimmune Institute Scholar
1st Year Scholar, PhD candidate

Biomedical Engineering, Computational Medicine
Johns Hopkins University

Research: 
My research aims to develop a computational model using machine learning and 3D time-lapse images to understand how distinct motility behaviors of B- and T-cells in mouse lymph nodes contribute...