Khalid Wins College Park Scholars Tri-Star Award

College Park Scholars, the University of Maryland's interdisciplinary living-learning program for select freshmen and sophomores, recently announced that Clark School and Fischell Department of Bioengineering (BioE) junior Mian Khalid is the recipient of its 2012 Tri-Star Award.

"The Tri-Star Award honors the student who exemplifies the qualities that are essential to all College Park Scholars participants: academic excellence, contribution to one’s community, and valuing the contribution of diversity to one’s learning," says Brent Hernandez, Assistant Director of the College Park Scholars program. "Mian embodies these very elements, and he’s excelled in every area."

Khalid, who double-majors in English, has been active in research since his arrival in College Park. He joined BioE professor Peter Kofinas' research group during his freshman year and quickly became a valuable member of Kofinas' Functional Macromolecular Laboratory, co-authoring three published papers and co-founding SafeLiCell, a startup company developing a solid-state polymer battery electrolyte called LithiumFlex. His work on the product has earned him a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Undergraduate Research Fellowship, and SafeLiCell $25,000 in business plan competition prizes from the Atlantic Coast Conference and the American Chemical Society. Outside of the lab, Khalid volunteers at the Muslim Community Medical Center in Silver Spring, Md. and serves as a Clark School Ambassador.

"College Park Scholars [was] a big part of the first two years of my undergraduate life," says Khalid. "I made friends, met professors who would become wonderful mentors, and learned the value of being involved in meaningful service for my community…Scholars has helped me think outside the box when it comes to applying concepts and being open minded in my engineering and English classes…[and] relat[ing] my research to a business idea in real terms. I want to thank Scholars for honoring me with such a prestigious award and I hope to maintain the vision of the [College Park Scholars] Founders' Circle by translating this into my successful dream career."

Published November 2, 2012