iCons Announces 2024 Nowick Award for Student Leadership and Philanthropy
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The Integrated Concentration in Science (iCons) program has announced that Commonwealth Honors College students Claudia Figueroa-Pabón ’25 (College of Engineering) and Shiven Patel ’26 are this year’s recipients of the Crowley-Nowick Award.
The Crowley-Nowick Award for iCons Student Philanthropy and Leadership was established through a gift from Peg Crowley-Nowick ’86, president of medical affairs consulting for Lumanity. Each year, the award is given to two iCons students who embody a strong sense of community within the iCons program and supporting the goal of giving back.
Figueroa-Pabón, of San Juan, Puerto Rico, is a rising senior in biomedical engineering on the iCons biomedical/biosystems track. She works as an engineering peer mentor with the College of Engineering’s Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion to support students and to improve the culture.
“My goal is to make the college, classes and overall environment of engineering accessible and welcoming to all,” says Figueroa-Pabón, a 2024 Sloan Student Fellow who will be working with Stacyann Bailey on investigating the mechanisms of increased skeletal fragility caused by cancer and cancer-related treatment.
Patel, a computer science major from India, is a rising junior on the iCons renewable energy track. Outside of iCons, he spends most of his time as a research assistant in the Dynamic and Autonomous Robotic Systems Lab (DARoS) as part of a team working on building a guide dog robot for the visually impaired.
“I am truly grateful to be a Crowley-Nowick Scholarship recipient,” Shiven says. “I look forward to working closely with the iCons leadership team in building a sense of community.”
He has also served as an undergraduate teaching assistant, a software engineer intern with UMass Amherst Information Technology, and as the president of CICSoft, a Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences student organization working to bridge the gap between industry and college.
More information about the iCons program can be found at icons.cns.umass.edu.
This story was originally published by the UMass Amherst Office of News and Media Relations.