Brandon Hopkins, an outstanding Eagle Scout and all-around American young man, has piled up honors and awards in a few short years. He graduated with a 4.0 grade point average from the Waterford School, Sandy, in June.

The 19-year-old Salt Lake man has won more than $100,000 in scholarships including his most recent, the Mabel S. Cooke Endowment Scholarship for up to $48,000 from the National Eagle Scout Association. More than 5,000 Scouts from around the United States applied for the award.

His four-page resume lists 45 honors and awards received in the past five years.

For his Eagle project, Brandon prepared and presented a Christmas musical program for the Women's and Children's Division of the Odyssey House, a halfway house and drug rehabilitation center in Salt Lake City.

He received the Duty to God award and has 12 Scout palms for which he earned 81 merit badges. The Sons of the American Revolution recently honored him as a national third-place winner of a SAR Eagle Scout scholarship for $2,000.

In 2001, Brandon attended the Boy Scout National Jamboree at Fort A.P. Hill, Va., where he served as a chaplain aide. He entered the Arts and Sciences Expo there and won awards of excellence in painting, photography, literature and science. Brandon's Jamboree science project was on "The Effect of Tap Water and Static Magnetic Fields on the Germination and Growth of Alfalfa Sprouts." He entered the project in the 2002 Salt Lake Valley Regional Science and Engineering Fair and won first place. He went on to be a finalist in the 2002 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in Louisville, Ky.

Starting from work done for the Scout genealogy merit badge, Brandon wrote an historical paper on James Otis Jr., to whom he is distantly related, and Otis' attack on Writs of Assistance. The paper was published in The Concord Review and won the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize of $3,000.

Brandon also prepared an essay for the American heritage merit badge comparing the war on terrorism with the Pequot War. He won a $1,000 scholarship from the United States Institute of Peace for that paper, which also won first place for Utah in the 2003 National Peace Essay Contest and placed in the finals at the 2003 National History Day Competition in College Park, Md.

While at the Waterford School, Brandon served as student body president and editor of the school paper.

He has been awarded a $39,800 scholarship by Harvard University, where he plans to major in physics and economics.

The Micron Technology Foundation has given him a Micron Science and Technology Scholarship for $16,500.

One of Brandon's projects, titled, "The Mathematical Modeling of Break Dancing," helped him qualify for several scholarships and awards. He used rotational matrices and orthonormal bases to generate 3D computer graphic images of the paths taken by the feet of a hypothetical break dancer doing a windmill, a move that involves rotation around two axes.

He analyzed the effect of the angle between a break dancer's legs on the energy required to carry out this move. The project won a fourth place in mathematics at the 2003 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in Cleveland.

---

E-mail: lweist@desnews.com