Five Named to NABC Honors Court

Once again, Caltech basketball players have been named to the NABC Honors Court. This year, five Beavers, all juniors, earned the honor. Ethan Boroson, Arjun Chandar, Christophe Kunesh, Alex Runkel, and Pan Wang each have a cumulative GPA of 3.2 or higher. Besides the GPA cutoff, to qualify for Honors Court, student-athletes must be a junior or senior.

The five honorees, tied for the most of any NCAA school's one class, are the most since Eslinger's first season, when seven players qualified (five seniors and two juniors). There were no seniors on this year's team.

Caltech release:
http://gocaltech.com/sports/mbkb/2011-12/releases/NABCHonorsCourt

Movin' On: Senior Headed to Stanford

Senior Ruslan Kurdyumov, a double major in mechanical engineering and business economics management and two-year member of the basketball team, is headed to the Stanford Mechanical Engineering graduate program. He will continue his work with robotics and controls as part of the masters curriculum that eventually leads to the Ph.D program.

Kurdyumov, who was recently recognized as Academic All-Conference and who was named to the NABC Honors Court in 2009, spent last summer designing a sampling system for the AXEL rover at JPL. Axel is a minimalist tethered rover designed for accessing extreme planetary terrain. This is useful because current rovers can't sample from scientifically interesting locations, such as the sides of crater walls.