Wesley Kinney, a rising senior at Mercer University double-majoring in electrical engineering and mathematics, is one of three Mercer students awarded a 2025 Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship, along with Isabella Phillips and Ainsley Westbrook. Dr. Makhin Thitsa noticed him as a freshman who seemed unchallenged in her sophomore-level course and invited him into her lab, where he now studies safety-critical control systems — specifically adaptive cruise control in which the controller and the system it manages communicate over an imperfect channel, forcing decisions on incomplete information. He is the only undergraduate on a team including collaborators from MIT and the University of Ferrara, and his work contributed to a journal article presented at the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control in Milan. He plans a master’s and Ph.D. in engineering.