The University of Tulsa is pleased to announce that undergraduates Kinlie Gililland and Cameron Walker have received 2025 Barry Goldwater Scholarships. This prestigious award recognizes exceptional undergraduates pursuing degrees in science, engineering, and/or mathematics disciplines.
Gililland is a biochemistry junior from Fort Worth, Texas. Walker is a physics and math junior from Tulsa. Only 441 Goldwater Scholarships were awarded for the 2025-26 academic year.
“It is remarkable that a small, private university like UTulsa should produce two Goldwater Scholars in the same year,” said President Brad Carson. “These two recipients come on the heels of Isa Fite, a UTulsa physics and math major who received a Goldwater Scholarship last year. We are incredibly proud of the boundless potential these students exhibit.”
Gililland has served as a peer mentor and university ambassador and currently conducts research in three labs – two on campus and one at the Laureate Institute for Brain Research. One of her on-campus projects involves identifying inhibitors of cancer cell metabolism, while the other seeks to determine the transcriptomic response to embryonic zebrafish development under hydrostatic pressure.
“The Goldwater justifies my time being spent on the thing that I love most at UTulsa: research! This recognition of the work that I have completed has inspired me to chase the next big opportunities, to say yes to the things that excite me, and to pursue my passions every way I can. I cannot wait to see what comes next,” she said.
Gililland intends to pursue a doctorate in neuropharmacology, specializing in translational addiction neuroscience. “I plan to use multidisciplinary neuroscience to develop therapeutic interventions for substance use disorders,” she said. “I have just been accepted to study addiction neuroscience this summer through the Wertheim UF Scripps Institute REU.”
Walker is a member of the Tulsa Undergraduate Research Challenge and is working on two challenging projects. The first involves numerical work alongside Fite on Bose-Einstein condensates (BEC). Walker is using the Gross-Pitaevskii equation, which is a model equation for the ground-state single-particle wavefunction in a BEC.
Walker’s second project is led by Warren Foundation Chair in Bioinformatics Brett McKinney, who was awarded an Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research grant from NASA. The research combines scientific/mechanistic modeling and novel experimental data with machine learning into a science-guided machine learning approach for solar system biosignature detection and for modeling ocean world geochemistry in the presence and absence of microbial life.
“My mom and grandparents are so proud,” said Walker, who was able to share the good news with his grandfather, a leukemia patient currently in hospice care. “I got emotional after reading the email from the Goldwater Foundation. This honor contextualizes that I am doing well in my academics and am going down the right path.” Walker, a first-generation college student, works as a physics tutor on campus and shoots video for the football team. He plans to pursue a doctorate and conduct research in the astrophysics or astrochemistry field.
In addition to faculty in Oxley College of Health & Natural Sciences – Scott Holmstrom, Maria Ironside, Shawn Jackson, Katelyn Mika, and Robert Sheaff – and the College of Engineering & Computer Science, as well as key high school teachers, Gililland and Walker thanked Terrie Shipley, director of national fellowships, for her support. The university encourages students to apply for competitive – and prestigious – awards and then guides them through an often daunting application process.
“This year, The University of Tulsa had more Goldwater Scholars than Rice, Southern Methodist University, and Texas Christian University combined,” Carson said. “It’s little wonder UTulsa is home to more National Merit scholars per capita than any university in the nation.”