The Love Family Foundation Scholarship goes each year to a member of the graduating class with the most outstanding scholastic record.

This year, the $10,000 scholarship provided by the Gay and Erskine Love Foundation went to Georgie Tzintzarov, an electrical and computer engineering major, and Charles M. Wang, a chemistry and computer science major. Students in all six of Georgia Tech’s colleges are considered for the award.

Both students have maintained a 4.0 GPA while engaging in multiple academic enrichment activities outside of normal coursework. The two received the award at the annual Student Honors Celebration on April 20.

Tzintzarov held summer internships at Cisco and Boeing, and he has worked as a co-op student in the Georgia Tech Research Institute’s Electronic Systems Lab. He was able to get a taste of research in two different labs during his undergraduate career. He worked in Professor Ayanna Howard’s Human-Automation Systems (HumAnS) Lab through the Opportunity Research Scholars (ORS) program and was later an undergraduate research assistant in Professor John Cressler’s Silicon-Germanium Devices and Circuits Lab.

Propelled by his exposure to undergraduate research, Tzintzarov is now pursuing a Ph.D. degree with a focus on microelectronics/microsystems with Professor Cressler as his advisor.

Outside of the lab, Tzintzarov is a member of Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity and led efforts to improve his fraternity’s academic performance while maintaining a healthy and balanced lifestyle. He hopes to inspire his brothers to be great leaders both at Georgia Tech and in life.

Given his numerous accomplishments, perhaps the most impressive part of Tzintzarov’s journey is where it began—in a small town in Eastern Europe. Below he expounds on his “American Genesis” story and how his upbringing made him the man he is today.

Read more about Tzintzarov.

Funded by a President’s Undergraduate Research Award, Wang worked with Josephine Yu, an assistant professor in the School of Mathematics. The undergraduate research has yielded two articles co-authored by Wang. “Generalized Permutohedra from Probabilistic Graphical Models” has been posted on arXiv.org and is under review for publication in the SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics. Another research article, “Toric h-vectors and Chow Betti Numbers of Dual Hypersimplices,” is in preparation.

“Charles has a rare combination of curiosity, perseverance, and mathematical and computational ability, which makes him an ideal research student,” Yu said. “I have every reason to believe that he will succeed in graduate school and beyond.”

Wang’s fondness for mathematics has taken him to Hungary, where he participated in Georgia Tech’s Budapest Semester in Mathematics Program and to North Carolina, Germany, and Finland to attend mathematical research summer workshops. He will pursue a Ph.D. in mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley.

Read more about Wang.