May 4, 2009
BALTIMORE, MD - Johns Hopkins senior men's swimmer John Kegelman (Yorktown, VA/Tabb) has been awarded a prestigious NCAA Postgraduate Scholarship it was announced recently. Kegelman is one of just 58 student-athletes nationwide (29 male/29 female), who compete in winter sports, that was selected and he is just the ninth men's swimmer and first since 2003 to earn the honor. Each of the 58 recipients will receive a $7,500 award in their pursuit of postgraduate studies.
Last spring Kegelman applied for and received a Provost's Undergraduate Research Award (PURA) for his project titled "Fluid Mechanical Evaluation of Arm Stroking Patterns in Front Crawl Swimming." He videotapes swimmers, including volunteers from the varsity team at Hopkins, wearing full-body Speedo fastskins with LEDs attached in specific places on the arm and chest. Kegelman then uses video analysis methods that he and his faculty sponsor, Dr. Lester Su, developed to track the hand and arm trajectory as it pulls through the water. He compares each stroke to see how "repeatable" it is, i.e. whether a swimmer has a set trajectory that each stroke follows, or he changes his trajectory dynamically based on flow conditions around the hand. Kegelman presented his results at the PURA poster session a few weeks ago.
In addition, Kegelman was a summer scholar at the NASA Langley Research Center. During this research project, he collected and compiled experimental data from a wind tunnel test on the separation event of the experimental flight test vehicle for one of NASA's crew launch vehicles. He has also interned at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab. Kegelman was an undergraduate research assistant for the Laboratory for Experimental Fluid Dynamics as a sophomore. And for the last two years, he has served as a teaching assistant for the Mechanical Engineering Freshman Laboratory.
A mechanical engineering major with a minor in entrepreneurship and management with a 4.00 cumulative GPA, Kegelman will pursue a Ph.D. in the area of robotics within the field of mechanical engineering at Stanford. He is a Dean's List student, a member of the Student Athlete Advisory Committee, the Tau Beta Pi Engineering Honor Society and the Pi Tau Sigma Mechanical Engineering Society.
Kegelman is a two-time captain for the men's swim team and has earned All-America honors five times in his career. At the 2009 NCAA Championships, he earned First Team All-America honors in the 200 and 400 Medley Relays. Both relay teams posted the second fastest times in program history at the championships. Kegelman posted the two fastest times on the team this season in the 100 Breast and two of the three fastest in the 200 Breast. He helped JHU to three top 10 finishes at the NCAAs, including a runner-up finish in 2008.
All-Time Johns Hopkins Men's Swimming NCAA Postgraduate Scholarship Recipients
2009-John Kegelman
2003-David Lofthus
1998-Matt Johnson
1996-Brian Ronson
1982-Bill Bender
1981-Jonathan Blank
1980-Bill Smiddy
1979-Dean Buchenauer
1977-John Dierkes
