Prize Recipient

Joel Corbo

Background:

Joel Corbo is a 17-year-old high school senior at Regis High School in Manhattan.  He was born in Queens and has lived all his life in Ridgewood with his parents, Giuseppe and Aymara Church since fifth grade.  At Regis, he was involved in several extracurricular activities, including the Chess Club and the Spanish and Latin American Cultural Society.  He has been a member of a Tai Chi Chuan class at Regis for the past two years.  He also does a number of service-related activities including in school tutoring, tutoring underprivileged elementary school students in the Bronx, acting as a teachers aid for a third grade class in lower Manhattan, and being a big brother to incoming freshmen.  Joel is also a big fan of the theater; he is a four-year member of the business staff of Regis Drama Society, an organization for which he was co-manager his senior year.  Joel has been interested in science for as long as he can remember.  He received the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Medal for Excellence in Math and Science his junior year, and was an Intel Science Talent Search finalist for an independent research project he started his sophomore year dealing with a methods for treating leather so that it stays cool in hot weather and warm in cold weather.  Joels first experience with physics came in his junior year at Regis; after taking physics for the first time, he fell in love with the subject.  He took a more advanced physics course his senior year and has also done a lot of reading on his own.  He plans on majoring in physics at MIT with the goal of eventually getting his Ph.D.  He wants to become a physics professor at a research university, so that he can both conduct research on whatever interests him and also teach the next generation of physicists.