During his four years at Rutgers, Simon Gordonov has been a top-performing cross-country and track-and-field athlete, an engineering major with a perfect grade-point average, and an advocate for advancing research opportunities among undergraduate and high school students. Last year, as a junior, he was one of only 278 students nationwide to receive a Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship, given to college sophomores and juniors who show unusual promise in engineering, mathematics, or science. Now, Gordonov has outdone himself, garnering the Churchill Scholarship from the Winston Churchill Foundation of the United States. The award, valued at $50,000 and given to only 14 students, is a yearlong invitation for graduate study at the University of Cambridge where Gordonov, a native of Russia, can take the first steps in pursuing a master of philosophy degree in computational biology. The Churchill Scholarship was created in 1963 when former British prime minister Winston Churchill invited colleagues in the United States to fund graduate study for young Americans at the nascent Churchill College, today one of 31 colleges at Cambridge. Gordonov, whose late father was a chemical engineer, is only the second Rutgers student to receive the honor, first awarded to John Maffei in 1967.