Johns Hopkins University computer science students Edmund Sumpena and Wu Han “Enoch” Toh are among the 441 students awarded Goldwater Scholarships—one of the oldest and most prestigious national scholarships in the United States—for the 2025-2026 academic year.
They were selected from a pool of more than 5,000 applicants for demonstrating exceptional promise in the natural sciences, engineering, and mathematics. Each Goldwater Scholar receives up to $7,500 toward the cost of tuition, mandatory fees, books, and room and board.
Established by Congress in 1986 to honor the legacy of soldier and statesman Barry Goldwater, it is one of the earliest significant national scholarships focusing on STEM fields. The national prestige afforded through the Goldwater Scholarship has also been known to give students a competitive edge when pursuing graduate fellowships in their fields. Many Goldwater Scholars at JHU and beyond go on to receive Rhodes Scholarships, Churchill Scholarships, Marshall Scholarships, Hertz Fellowships, Graduate Research Fellowships from the National Science Foundation, and other prestigious awards.
Sumpena and Toh are two of the four JHU nominees to the national competition this year; all were awarded scholarships.
More about the department’s scholars:
Edmund Sumpena (’26 Computer Science, Neuroscience) plans to become a physician-scientist leading research in early neuro-visual disease biomarkers and brain disease progression. Since 2023, Sumpena has worked with CS’ Craig Jones and Amir Kashani of the Wilmer Eye Institute to develop novel deep learning models that improve clinical efficiency and interpretation of 3D retinal imaging. This past summer, Sumpena began an additional project as a research intern at the Mayo Clinic on an automated pipeline to improve pathological reporting. He has presented his work with Jones and Kashani to the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology in 2024 and is first author of a manuscript submitted to Medical Image Analysis. Outside of his research, Sumpena has been a teaching and course assistant for computer science classes. He also devotes time to community service as community outreach chair for Advocates for Baltimore Community Health, providing health resources to Baltimoreans experiencing homelessness, and prepping and serving meals to individuals recovering from addiction at Helping Up Mission.
Wu Han “Enoch” Toh (’26 Computer Science, Molecular and Cellular Biology) aspires to lead a cross-disciplinary research group dedicated to bridging experimental and computational approaches to advance the development of gene therapies. Upon arriving at Hopkins, Toh joined Hai-Quan Mao’s lab at the Institute for NanoBioTechnology and began work on optimizing Lipid Nanoparticles (LNPs) to deliver targeted gene therapy to helper T-cells. His research with Mao evolved into developing a machine learning-driven platform to accelerate LNP compositional screening, with potential applications in LNP-mediated gene editing and mRNA cancer vaccines. Mao asked Toh (then just a sophomore) to lead a collaborative project with Red Abbey Labs, a local neuropharmaceutical startup, to explore the potential of LNPs in small-molecule drug delivery. Toh broadened his research experience further in the 2024 Harvard Immunology Undergraduate Summer Program, where he worked reducing toxicity in many current immunotherapies. He is first author of a manuscript recently submitted to Nature Communications and is co-author of additional articles that have appeared in Nature Biomedical Engineering (2023) and Biomaterials (2024). He has also presented his research to the American Society for Gene and Cell Therapy (2024) and the Biomedical Engineering Society Annual Meeting (2024). Outside of the lab, Toh serves as president of the Immunology & Immunoengineering Club and the JHU chapter of the Omicron Delta Kappa Leadership Honor Society; he also volunteers as a tutor with the Henderson-Hopkins Tutorial Program and as a peer listener with A Place to Talk. He has TAd several classes, as well.
To learn more about the Goldwater Scholarship and other available fellowships, visit the National Fellowship Program website.