Oak Ridge senior Andrew Skipper earns UT-Battelle scholarship

Andrew Skipper, a senior at Oak Ridge High School, is the recipient of the 2014 UT-Battelle Scholarship to the University of Tennessee.

The four-year, $20,000 scholarship is presented annually to a graduating senior who plans to study science, engineering, or mathematics at UT and whose mother or father works at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Andrew is the son of David and Maria Skipper. David Skipper works in ORNL’s Environmental Protection and Waste Services Division, and Maria Skipper works in ORNL’s Business Management Services Division. His grandmother, Margie Skipper, worked in ORNL’s Laboratory Protection Division for many years prior to her retirement in 1999.

Andrew’s goal at UT is to pursue a bachelor’s degree in chemical and biomolecular engineering before enrolling in graduate or medical school.

“I would like to work for either a hospital or a research institution in a position that would allow me to work with doctors and nurses to develop new technology that would improve the efficiency with which their patients are treated,” Andrew wrote in his scholarship application essay. “More specifically, a position in sports medicine would be ideal for me because I would be able to design devices that would help to treat and ultimately prevent the kinds of devastating injuries that are so common in sports today.”

Andrew is a member of the National Honor Society, the Spanish Honor Society, All-East Tennessee Orchestra, and a recipient of the Daughters of the American Revolution Good Citizenship Award. He served as a Tennessee Boys State delegate, an Oak Ridge High School Student Council representative, and a member of Youth Leadership Oak Ridge. A member of First Presbyterian Church of Knoxville, he has volunteered at the Children’s Museum of Oak Ridge and Methodist Medical Center of Oak Ridge. He has played on Oak Ridge High School’s baseball and tennis teams.

The UT-Battelle Scholarship is a competitive award distributed in $5,000 increments over four years of undergraduate study at UT.

UT-Battelle manages ORNL for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.