Congratulations to the winners of the 2007 James Randi Educational Foundation scholarships.
Catherine Holloway – Nova Scotia, Canada
Catherine Holloway is an undergraduate physics student at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, Canada. She writes a weekly column for her university newspaper called ?The Scientific Skeptic? and is the editor in chief of the St.Francis Xavier University Community Science Journal.
In high school, Catherine organized and ran her own science day camp and got to the national level of a French public speaking competition with a speech inspired by Carl Sagan. She has a keen interest in nanotechnology and expects her first research paper on the morphology and growth conditions of carbon nanotubes to be published in September.
Matthew Dentith – New Zealand
Born and bred in Auckland, New Zealand, Matthew has a long standing interest in the teaching and promoting of critical thinking skills. He is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Auckland where he is currently working on his thesis which explores the epistemology of Conspiracy Theories. His current work focuses on the nature of knowledge transmission via testimony, which he contends is the primary source of knowledge about Conspiracy Theories. We need to be able to explain both why we think that testimony is reliable and why we are usually right to dismiss Conspiracy Theories when we hear them.
Robin Zebrowski – Portland, OR
Robin L. Zebrowski is an ABD Ph.D. student in the philosophy department at the University of Oregon. She has been teaching critical thinking courses since she began graduate school in New York in 1998, and finds nothing more rewarding than watching undergraduates turn their lives and belief systems upside down after learning how to reason and examine evidence. Her work has traditionally been within the field of cognitive science, and her dissertation is an examination of how we conceptualize bodies, and how our theories of embodiment are affected by this conceptualization. Her work finds applications in a great variety of fields, from linguistics, to disability studies, to artificial intelligence. She spends too much time reading evolution blogs and playing with robots.
Whitney Webster – Odessa, TX
Whitney Webster is a recent high school graduate who attended TAM 5 earlier this year. She will enter her freshman year of college at Texas Tech University this Fall and will be majoring in Pre-Pharmacy. She plans to have a dual major in Chemistry.