Two rising Pomona College seniors have received the prestigious Goldwater Scholarship for the 2025-26 academic year.
Chloe Marple ’26 and Sage Santomenna ’26 were among the 441 college students recognized by the Goldwater Foundation for their exceptional promise of becoming research leaders in the fields of natural sciences, engineering and mathematics.
More than 5,000 college sophomores and juniors across the country apply for the Goldwater Scholarship annually.
Recent Pomona recipients include Daniel Gao ’25, Alexandra Turvey ’24, Zoë Batterman ’24, Hannah Caris ’23 and Jonathan Elisabeth ’23.
Chloe Marple
Marple, a mathematics major by way of San Francisco, California, traces her interest in math to the linear algebra class she took with Shahriar Shahriari, William Polk Russell Professor of Mathematics and Statistics, her first semester at Pomona.
“It was a great class for building community and helping me find a place in the Math Department,” she says. “And taking abstract algebra the next semester really cemented my desire to become a researcher in math.”
Many a night Marple has spent bonding with fellow math majors over difficult assignments, and the opportunity to do research with Konrad Aguilar, assistant professor of mathematics and statistics, “has been really valuable,” she says.
Marple says she finds fascinating “this balance of [math] being a very precise, scientific subject and also a subject that requires a lot of creativity. There’s not a lot of rote calculation or memorization or things that people think of when they think of math,” she adds.
“Having to balance precision and creativity in math makes it difficult,” she says, “but that challenge is also what makes it interesting to me.”
Marple intends to earn a Ph.D. in mathematics and conduct research in low-dimensional topology, which will ideally allow her to become a university professor.
Sage Santomenna
When Santomenna, a physics and astronomy major from Freeport, Maine, missed Accepted Students Day due to a scheduling conflict, they showed up to campus unannounced and asked the Physics and Astronomy Department coordinator if any professors could meet on short notice.
Philip Choi, associate professor of physics and astronomy, carved out 90 minutes in his schedule to share all things Pomona with Santomenna and their father.
“I went back to my hotel room and accepted the offer that afternoon,” they say. “And from the week I got on campus to now, I’ve been working in (Choi’s) lab.”
While a great distance from their hometown, Pomona promised Santomenna a place they could learn from peers and professors in a collaborative environment.
Choi has connected Santomenna with alumni and others in physics, and Santomenna says they enjoy “the challenge that comes with [physics and astronomy] being one of the only sciences that can’t, for the most part, perform experiments.”
“We’re limited to being as resourceful as possible to take advantage of what nature has presented us in terms of what we can see in the universe,” they add. “All the experiments have been performed for us, so we’re just observing the results to understand the evolutionary path that led to the universe looking like it does today.”
Santomenna plans to pursue a Ph.D. in astrophysics after graduating, with a focus on conducting research in galaxy evolution.