McDaniel College Alumnus Jeff Groff Receives College Scholar Alumni Award

WESTMINSTER, MD (04/01/2013)(readMedia)-- Dr. Jeff Groff, a 2001 alumnus of McDaniel College and assistant professor of physics at Shepherd University in Shepherdstown, W.Va., is the recipient of the College Scholar Alumni Award at McDaniel College.

The College Scholar Alumni Award is given annually to a college scholar, a designation that graduates of McDaniel's Honors Program earn, who has demonstrated leadership in career, academic and civic involvement.

Groff, who grew up in Lancaster, Pa., graduated Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude with departmental honors in physics and a minor in chemistry from McDaniel. He earned a master's degree and a Ph.D. in Applied Science with a specialization in computational biophysics from the College of William & Mary, Williamsburg, Va.

As a tenure-track professor at Shepherd University, he takes an interdisciplinary approach to physics and strives to interest students in the emerging graduate and career opportunities at the interface of the physical and biological sciences. He has received grants totaling over $78,000, including a prestigious NASA West Virginia Space Grant Consortium Innovation Grant and a NASA West Virginia Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (NASA WV EPSCoR) Innovation Grant, in part, to purchase lab equipment for developing new hands-on laboratory exercises that use physical principles to study biological phenomena and systems.

Groff promotes renewable energy and environmental sustainability and has forged connections with Shepherd's Environmental Studies faculty to use electronic sensors coupled to digital electronics for environmental monitoring and remote sensing applications.

More information about McDaniel College's Honors Program

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McDaniel College, recognized nationally among "40 Colleges that Change Lives" and U.S. News top-tier liberal arts colleges, is a four-year private college of the liberal arts and sciences offering more than 70 undergraduate programs of study, including dual and student-designed majors, plus 25 highly regarded graduate programs. Its hallmark faculty-student collaborations in research, teaching and mentoring plus hundreds of leadership and service opportunities enrich a lively learning experience that is rooted in a personalized interdisciplinary and global curriculum. Innovative January courses take students to points all over the world while McDaniel's degree-granting European campus offers a unique opportunity for international study at the only American university in Budapest, Hungary. A diverse and close-knit community of 1,600 undergraduates and 1,560 part-time graduate students, McDaniel also boasts a spectacular 160-acre hilltop campus in Westminster, Md., an hour or less from Baltimore, D.C., the Chesapeake Bay, an Amtrak station and BWI international airport.