2026 PBKNCA Grad Scholarship Winners Announced

Three UC Davis graduate students were selected to receive 2026 Phi Beta Kappa Northern California Association (PBKNCA) scholarships this spring. The scholarship recipients are PhD students Moreen Akomea-Ampeh, Sylvana Finn and Jacob Steenis. The $10,000 scholarships are awarded annually to graduate students who were elected to Phi Beta Kappa as undergraduates and now attend a northern California college or university that has a Phi Beta Kappa chapter. Learn more about the scholarships at the PBKNCA website and see the complete list of 2026 winners with summaries of their research.

Moreen Akomea-Ampeh is a PhD candidate in the Agricultural and Environmental Chemistry Graduate Group and Department of Land, Air, and Water Resources. She earned a B.A. in Chemistry with a minor in Creative Writing from Augustana College in Illinois, where she was inducted into PBK. Her research integrates renewable energy and aqueous geochemistry to investigate metal contamination risks associated with floating photovoltaics (FPVs), which are solar panels deployed atop water surfaces. Because FPVs can overlap with water resources used for agriculture and drinking water, her work evaluates whether clean energy technologies may affect water quality. Her first research article on this topic was published in the Journal of Environmental Management.

Sylvana Finn is a PhD candidate in the Ecology Graduate Group, where she is co-advised by Dr. Elizabeth Crone and Dr. Neal Williams. She is fascinated by how organisms time their life cycles. In particular, she studies how bumble bee life cycles respond to environmental change, including warming temperatures and urbanization. She has found that bumble bees are highly responsive to environmental conditions, with some urban environments supporting year-round activity. Sylvana holds an M.S. in Biology from Tufts University and a B.A. in Biology from Skidmore College, where she was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. She is honored to hold the Phi Beta Kappa key of her late grandmother, whom she knows would have been especially proud of this achievement.

Jacob Steenis, a PhD student in the Physics Department, received the PBKNCA Hendess Scholarship. Jacob currently works on experiments based at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, Switzerland. At this site, superconducting magnets force protons to collide together at the highest energies ever produced by humankind. These collisions are key to understanding the fundamental properties of our universe because they have the potential to reveal “new physics.” This new physics is what Jacob is searching for, specifically, signatures of “millicharged particles.” These are particles that are theorized to have an electric charge about 0.1% that of the electron. If discovered, these could provide great insights into dark matter and could directly influence the way in which we mathematically describe electromagnetism.

Jacob has worked to develop the FORMOSA detector which aims itself at the high-energy proton collisions of the LHC. This is a device specifically designed to search for millicharged particles; over the course of 2025 it collected roughly 50TB (50,000 GB) of data. These data will provide useful insights into the presence (or absence) of millicharges throughout the universe.

Jacob thanks PBKNCA and Ray Hendess for this wonderful opportunity and for the support in pursuing his dream of making meaningful contributions to the field of physics. He also wants to extend his most heartfelt thanks to Prof. Bob Cadmus at Grinnell College, for helping him embark on this physics journey in the first place. Jacob was inducted into PBK at Grinnell College.

About the PBKNCA Scholarships

The PBKNCA Graduate Scholarships are offered annually. Applicants must be graduate students in any discipline who are members of Phi Beta Kappa. The application process for UC Davis graduate students is announced in the fall on the UC Davis Phi Beta Kappa website, with applications typically due to be submitted in early February to our local chapter.