Four Johns Hopkins students awarded Goldwater Scholarships

Johns Hopkins University students Edmund Sumpena, Wu Han (Enoch) Toh, Gavin Wang, and Lance Xu are among 441 students awarded Goldwater Scholarships—one of the oldest and most prestigious national scholarships in the United States—for the 2025-2026 academic year.

They were selected from a pool of more than 5,000 applicants for demonstrating exceptional promise in the natural sciences, engineering, and mathematics. Each Goldwater Scholar receives up to $7,500 toward the cost of tuition, mandatory fees, books, and room and board. Sophomore recipients receive a second year of funding.

Established by Congress in 1986 to honor the legacy of soldier and statesman Barry Goldwater, it is one of the earliest significant national scholarships focusing on STEM fields. The national prestige afforded through the Goldwater Scholarship has also been known to give students a competitive edge when pursuing graduate fellowships in their fields. Many Goldwater Scholars at JHU and beyond go on to receive Rhodes Scholarships, Churchill Scholarships, Marshall Scholarships, Hertz Fellowships, Graduate Research Fellowships from the National Science Foundation, and many other prestigious awards.

All four of JHU's nominees to the national competition were awarded scholarships.

More about JHU's scholars:

Edmund Sumpena ('26 Computer Science, Neuroscience) plans to become a physician-scientist leading research in early neuro-visual disease biomarkers and brain disease progression. Since 2023, Sumpena has worked with Craig Jones of the Department of Computer Science and Amir Kashani of the Wilmer Eye Institute to develop novel deep learning models that improve clinical efficiency and interpretation of 3D retinal imaging. This past summer, he began an additional project as a research intern at the Mayo Clinic on an automated pipeline to improve pathological reporting. Sumpena has presented his work with Jones and Kashani to the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology in 2024 and is first author of a manuscript submitted to Medical Image Analysis. Outside of his research, Sumpena has been a teaching and course assistant for computer science classes. He also devotes time to community service as community outreach chair for Advocates for Baltimore Community Health, providing health resources to Baltimoreans experiencing homelessness, and prepping and serving meals to individuals recovering from addiction at Helping Up Mission.

Wu Han (Enoch) Toh ('26 Computer Science, Molecular & Cellular Biology) aspires to lead a cross-disciplinary research group dedicated to bridging experimental and computational approaches to advance the development of gene therapies. Upon arriving at Hopkins, Toh joined Hai-Quan Mao's lab at the Institute for NanoBioTechnology and began work on optimizing Lipid Nanoparticles (LNPs) to deliver targeted gene therapy to helper T-cells. His research with Mao evolved into developing a machine learning-driven platform to accelerate LNP compositional screening, with potential applications in LNP-mediated gene editing and mRNA cancer vaccines. Mao asked Toh (then just a sophomore) to lead a collaborative project with Red Abbey Labs, a local neuropharmaceutical startup, to explore the potential of LNPs in small-molecule drug delivery. Toh broadened his research experience further in the 2024 Harvard Immunology Undergraduate Summer Program, where he worked reducing toxicity in many current immunotherapies. He is first author of a manuscript recently submitted to Nature Communications and is co-author of additional articles that have appeared in Nature Biomedical Engineering (2023) and Biomaterials (2024). He has also presented his research to the American Society for Gene and Cell Therapy (2024) and Biomedical Engineering Society Annual Meeting (2024). Outside of the lab, Toh serves as president of the Immunology & Immunoengineering Club and the JHU chapter of the Omicron Delta Kappa (ODK) Leadership Honor Society; and he volunteers as a tutor with the Henderson-Hopkins Tutorial Program and as a peer listener with A Place to Talk. He has TA'd several classes as well.

Gavin Wang ('26 Physics, Mathematics) aims to become a leading researcher in the field of exoplanet characterization. Wang experienced the excitement of discovering exoplanets in high school, when he joined NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) Follow-up Program. He eventually contributed to the discovery of more than a dozen exoplanets, in turn leading to 24 co-authored publications from work he did before college. The January before his arrival at Hopkins, he reached out to Néstor Espinoza at the Space Telescope Science Institute and began analyzing variability in transit depth, the measure used to determine planet radius, for a subset of planets for which transit depth is not a constant. He has shared this work in a first-author publication in The Astronomical Journal (2024) and multiple conference presentations. He took on an additional project with Espinoza to develop a better method for reducing the "pink (1/f) noise" in the near-infrared detection data produced by the James Webb Space Telescope. He embarked on a separate line of research with David Sing, Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Physics, in the spring of his first year to measure the mass of a low-density exoplanet; this work has led to a second first-author manuscript recently submitted to The Astronomical Journal. Wang also secured an internship at Caltech's Exoplanet Technology Lab last summer to study atmospheric layers of a "brown dwarf" (objects that are between planets and stars in their mass). In his free time, he has served as a teaching assistant for Physics I, tutored with the JHU Learning Den, and written a blog post about his research for "Hopkins Insider."

Lance Xu ('27 Biomedical Engineering) wants to devote his career to investigating the mechanisms behind cancer cell progression to find common biomarkers that can lead to more precise and effective therapies. Building on his research in high school at the Pennsylvania Biotechnology Center on the effects of an oncogene on liver cancer progression, Xu joined Andrew Holland's lab at the School of Medicine upon his arrival at JHU and started with a project focused on investigating AURKA function in acentrosomal cells. He has since developed increasingly independent projects in the Holland Lab on the regulation via gene TRIM-37 of centrosomes, potentially offering a new avenue for TRIM protein-based therapeutics. This work has earned him a co-author credit on an article in Nature Structural and Molecular Biology and second-author credit on a paper submitted to The EMBO Journal. At the end of his first year, Xu began working additionally in Jordan Green's lab in the Department of Biomedical Engineering to gain translational research experience. In the Green Lab, he is working on two projects: one utilizing biodegradable polymeric nanoparticles to deliver nucleic acid cargos for gene editing of the heart, another synthesizing new polymers useful in cancer therapeutics. Beyond his research, Xu devotes considerable energy to academic support for peers and high schoolers. He serves as assistant director and head lecturer for the Organic Chemistry Initiative and a PILOT leader, in both roles helping JHU peers with the challenges of organic chemistry. He founded and leads a volunteer organization to provide free resources for high schoolers for AP courses and finding research opportunities, too, and volunteers with Charm City STEM league.

To learn more about the Goldwater Scholarship and other available fellowships, visit the National Fellowship Program website.