Ossining High Grads Honored by President Obama

President Barack Obama named Jacob Taylor and Justin Kasper as two of the top 94 young scientists in the United States. Kasper and Taylor were given the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. The honor is the top award given to scientists and engineers who are starting their research careers.
 
Kasper helped design a piece of equipment that will be used by NASA to research the Sun in a special upcoming mission in 2018. The instrument is known as the Solar Probe Plus. The Solar Probe Plus would be the first piece of equipment to sample the Sun's outer atmosphere.

In addition to his award from the President, Kasper is also being named as one of Popular Science Magazine's "Brilliant Ten" top scientists under the age of 40. Kasper is a researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Jacob Taylor is a researcher at the Joint Quantum Institute. He is being honored for his research on quantum fault tolerance and on the dynamic properties of quantum information devices.

“I feel very lucky. There’s wonderful research happening all over the world and throughout the United States, so I feel very fortunate that I was among those chosen," said Taylor.  "[I] had a wonderful physics teacher named Howard Myers [at OHS] who did a great job of engaging students in big concepts. He encouraged me and several of my classmates to do extracurricular science activities at IBM and Columbia University.”