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SALT LAKE CITY — By his own definition, Ethan Lake was not a star student in high school. One year, he even came home with a “D” on his report card. The subject? Physics.
Half a decade later, Lake was awarded $250,000 as a winner of the extremely prestigious Hertz Fellowship and has been described as being on a trajectory to become one of the “leading lights” of theoretical physics in the 21st century.
Out of 721 applicants, Lake was one of only 12 students nationally to receive the Hertz Fellowship, which offers undergraduate students a grant for up to five years of graduate study and research in science, technology, engineering or mathematics. Lake is now currently debating whether to study theoretical physics at Caltech, MIT, Stanford or Harvard, all of which accepted him even before the Hertz was awarded mid-March.
“I think I had some aptitude for math when I was young, but in high school, I got moody and rebellious and was into playing with bands and girls and academics went by the wayside,” Lake said. “But then the summer before I started college, I read a biography of Richard Feynman, which made doing physics seem like lots of fun. I worked through problems in a mathematical model and physical sciences book … because I was bored, and it was a lot of fun.”
With a newfound love of physics, Lake took a variety of physics classes his first semester at the University of Utah and decided to focus on astrophysics, where he studied the environments surrounding galaxies in the early universe and the gravitational microlensing of extrasolar asteroid belts.
After making progress in astrophysics, Lake made a characteristically impulsive move to change his focus of study halfway through his college career and delved into condensed matter theory to work on a problem in theoretical superconductivity with professors Dima Pesin and Oleg Starykh.
“Ethan has progressed steadily from a theoretical physics novice, learning such basic theory as unitary transformations and second quantization, to an expert in exotic p-wave superconductivity and many-body perturbation theory,” Starykh said in a news release. “This progress is truly amazing and in my experience, unprecedented.”
According to Lake, the Hertz Fellowship will give him an enormous amount of freedom to study and research what he wants in graduate school. As someone who’s known to “meander” when it comes to academics, Lake appreciates the ability the grant gives him to do just that.
“It gives you lots of freedom to do what you want in grad school. Based on how my undergrad research went, that’s something I was really excited about. I wanted to be my own boss in graduate school,” Lake said. “I want to satiate my curiosity about what’s going on in theoretical physics … I’m not driven by a desire to solve really hard problems and become super famous … I want to continue to be curious and not let career decisions pressure me.”
According to Michelle Taliaferro, who helped Lake prepare and apply for the Hertz as the senior scholarship advisor at the University of Utah, Lake has always been very passionate about physics but has especially learned the value of collaboration within the last year or so.
“He is operating beyond a graduate student level … (but) he is incredibly humble and he’s incredibly passionate about physics. He definitely wants to collaborate, he wants to be his best, he wants to learn,” Taliaferro said.
During his undergraduate career, Lake wrote six first-author publications with another three papers in the works and is currently studying the role that topology plays in condensed matter theory and quantum information theory.
He is also only the second student at the U. to win the award after former student Eric Kelson won it in 1989. Kelson is now chairman of the chemistry department of Cal State Northridge after receiving his Ph.D. at Caltech and doing post-doctorate work at Princeton.
“For Eric, it was a great stepping stone for his career and in many respects just verified what we knew about him, that he was that good,” said Thomas Richmond, a professor of Chemistry at the U. and one of Kelson’s first mentors. “These things are so competitive. … Our best students at the U. are as good as any place in the country. It’s really neat when we have a student that shows that on a national level.”
According to Taliaferro, the fact that Lake has received the award will also aid future students to believe in their own capabilities as well. Many of the students that apply for these prestigious scholarships are from Ivy League schools, so many students are intimidated by the competition and wonder if they have a chance at winning any of these scholarships, Taliaferro said.
Lake’s story, however, is the kind of inspiration many students need to remember that they, too, can achieve great things, no matter where they started, Taliaferro said.
“If I were to give people of (high school) age advice,” Lake said, “don’t worry about what others expect. Do whatever you want to do and don’t worry about expectations that are set for you.”
Liesl is a reporter at KSL.com, section editor of KSL Tech and a student at Brigham Young University. You can email her at lnielsen@ksl.com and follow her on Twitter at @liesl_nielsen.
