Beto Patino Luna, a geography (geology) and physics major at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, is one of 441 recipients of the 2025 Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship and the fifth Warhawk ever to earn it. A first-generation college student from Janesville who worked as a welder in high school, he joined Professor Juk Bhattacharyya’s lab during his first week on campus and won an Outstanding Poster award for physical modeling of landslide conditions using sand, water, and a Raspberry Pi. He has since studied rock deformation with Penn State geoscientists, won a national AIPG undergraduate scholarship, and traveled to Iceland on a study course. “There are three people from Yale, three people from UW-Madison … and one from UW-Whitewater,” Bhattacharyya said.