F ost e ring an int e ll e ctually c e nt e r e d stud e nt cultur e
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Daniel J. (DJ) Strouse, USC’s First Churchill Scholar By Cristy Lytal
For Daniel J. (DJ) Strouse, USC’s first Churchill scholar, one of his fondest childhood memories involves a math problem. “In first grade, we were doing one-digit multiplication tables, and I solved them all very quickly because I really liked math,” he said. “My teacher gave me 11 times 11. I thought about it and quickly noticed a pattern. I ran to my teacher and said, ‘121! 121!’ I was so excited, because she hadn’t told us how to do two-digit numbers.” That was Strouse’s first step toward winning a scholarship to the University of Cambridge, where he will conduct computational neuroscience research. Each year, the Winston Churchill Foundation of the United States covers tuition, fees, living, travel and certain research expenses for up to 14 U.S. scholars in the sciences, engineering and mathematics. Scholars exhibit outstanding academic talent and personal qualities, and at least eight of them have won the Nobel Prize. I’m very excited about being at one of the oldest universities in the world for a year — this is not lost on me,” said Strouse, a USC Presidential Scholar and member of the Phi Beta Kappa, Upsilon Pi
Epsilon and Tau Beta Pi honor societies. “I keep telling my friends that I hope it’s something like Hogwarts, and we wear school robes to dinner and wander around the halls at night by candlelight and such. But I think it’s a pretty modern place.” A native of Newark, Del., who enrolled at USC as a history major, Strouse didn’t originally envision himself as a Cambridge-bound scientist. Fittingly, the light bulb first went off for Strouse in Professor Paolo Zanardi’s introductory physics class on electricity and magnetism. Strouse changed his major to mathematics and physics and did quantum information research with Zanardi at the Institute for Scientific Interchange in Italy and at the Institute for Quantum Computing in Canada. “If students make it their priority, they can start research from day one, as soon as they come into the university,” said Strouse. At USC, Strouse pursued neuroscience research with professors Michael Arbib and Ted Berger, and worked with Professor Bartlett Mel in the Laboratory for Neural Computation through funding from a USC Provost’s Undergraduate Research Fellowship. He also found a mentor in Professor Stephan Haas, vice dean for research at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. “Whenever I get really excited about some topic, and I’m learning about it outside of class, and there’s no one else to ask, I always run to Professor Zanardi and Professor Haas,” said Strouse. “They’re always willing to answer questions for me.” As an undergraduate, Strouse also conducted a social entrepreneurship project in India as a USC Stevens Global Impact fellow, interned in Shanghai, China through the USC Career Center’s Global Fellows Internship Program and participated in the Amgen Scholars Program at Stanford University. He co-founded an opensource Web platform called CoLab for scientists to share their findings and started a 300-member student hiking club. “DJ is energetic, naturally curious and, as his experiences demonstrate, he has tremendous intellectual capacity,” said Noosha Malek, director for Academic Recognition Programs. “We are incredibly proud of his achievement.” After his year in Cambridge, Strouse will pursue a Ph.D. with support from a Department of Energy Computational Sciences Graduate Fellowship and plans to become a professor of physics, math or neuroscience. “There are several things I enjoy, but two of them are research and teaching, and that describes what a professor does,” he said. “I can’t imagine anything more fun than continuing research and then getting the chance to teach students who are just getting interested in this like I was a couple of years ago. I had some wonderful mentors at USC, and I would like to be able to do for other students what those mentors did for me.”
For more information, visit www.usc.edu/student-affairs/LSS/arp.