Erik Medina
Erik Medina selected as Princeton valedictorian, Rosie Eden as salutatorian
Erik Medina, a chemistry major from Miami, has been named the Princeton Class of 2025 valedictorian. Rosie Eden, a classics major from Scottsdale, Arizona, has been selected as the salutatorian. The Princeton faculty accepted the nominations of the Faculty Committee on Examinations and Standing at its April 28 meeting.
Commencement for the Class of 2025 will take place at Princeton Stadium on Tuesday, May 27. Medina and Eden are expected to deliver remarks at the ceremony.
Erik Medina
Medina said he is passionate about his research into upcycling unrecyclable plastics, sharing science with others and the power of chemistry to improve people’s lives.
When, during his junior year, he saw Erin Stache, assistant professor of chemistry, present her plastic upcycling research at a symposium, he knew he’d found the perfect application for the organic chemistry he loved. Stache, then new at Princeton, hadn’t planned to bring undergraduates into her lab yet. He quickly won her over, said Stache.
“The combination of research interest, real world applications and a personal connection with the professor was fantastic,” Medina said.
His senior thesis, “Burning Rubber Duckies with Flashlights: Applications of Photothermal Conversion to PVC Chemical Upcycling,” successfully identified a new way to transform post-consumer products, like Styrofoam, sushi containers, PVC pipes and rubber duckies, into useful chemicals without creating dangerous byproducts. The resulting paper, co-authored with graduate student Hanning Jiang, was published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS) in January.
“That’s our flagship journal,” Stache said. “We target JACS for every paper we want to publish. For an undergraduate to get a co-first-author paper, after less than a year of research — that just doesn’t happen.”
His senior spring, having completed — and published — his thesis research, Medina could be forgiven for taking it easy, but instead he dreamed up new experiments, coming into the lab almost every day, even Saturdays. Stache said that Medina has developed a new research direction for her lab, which will be continued by a postdoctoral researcher.
In addition to his chemistry major, Medina is deeply engaged in language and culture studies. The grandchild of four Cuban immigrants, he is not only bilingual in Spanish and English, but also conversational in French and Mandarin Chinese, and he took additional classes at Princeton in American Sign Language and Near Eastern studies.
“Outside of chemistry, the language classes were definitely the most impactful courses,” Medina said.
Medina’s professors describe his work as consistently exceptional. “There wasn’t anything that he didn’t excel at,” said Michael Kelly, who has taught chemistry at Princeton for 17 years. “He was a student with me in three separate courses, earning an A+ in all three. I teach the core laboratory course, which spans the breadth of chemistry — from biology to quantum physics — and I’ve never had one student be the best at all of them before.”
Medina is also committed to communicating his love of chemistry. He taught science classes to middle schoolers during his first two college summers. While in Princeton, he participated in public outreach activities like Día de la Ciencia/Science Day at the local public library, worked as an undergraduate course assistant for organic chemistry, held weekend office hours for his fellow Princeton students, and created a YouTube channel to explain complex ideas to STEM students around the world.
“He has a gift for presenting concepts to students in a way that they can easily grasp,” said Erik Sorensen, Princeton’s Arthur Allan Patchett Professor in Organic Chemistry. “He inspires his students as he teaches them. We did not teach Erik to be this way; these traits and abilities are intrinsic to him.”
Medina has been accepted into a Ph.D. program in organic chemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, but first he will take a year to teach at Ransom Everglades School, the high school where he played three varsity sports and graduated as valedictorian.
Medina is a member of the Phi Beta Kappa Society and has earned Princeton’s Shapiro Prize for Academic Excellence and the William Foster Memorial Prize in Chemistry, the highest departmental honor given to a junior. He also received a 2025 Graduate Research Fellowship Program Honorable Mention from the National Science Foundation. He is a member of New College West.
“I don’t think even his classmates realize how talented he is,” Kelly said. “Erik is a humble guy, willing to talk to everybody and very personable. We usually want gifted, talented, personable people to be doctors and teachers, but a guy like Erik can figure out things about the world and how science works that other people have not yet discovered. It takes a special talent to do that, and he has it. A lot of people say they aspire to change the world, but some people just might. He’s on the latter list.”
Rosie Eden
Rosie Eden
Eden, who is also pursuing minors in philosophy and humanistic studies, said she fell in love with classics after taking the interdisciplinary Humanities Sequence her first year at Princeton. She is now a Humanities Sequence peer mentor, helping to guide and build community among students in the yearlong class.
“I truly enjoyed reading and discussing ancient texts in the course and wanted to have the ability to read them in their original language, which motivated my decision to study ancient Greek,” Eden said. “I also felt so welcomed by the Classics faculty and community!”
Eden said being selected as the salutatorian is a tremendous honor and she feels “immensely privileged to be able to address the class at Commencement.”
After graduation, Eden plans to attend law school and hopes to one day become a judge. She said her interest in the law is closely tied to her experiences studying classics. The summer after her sophomore year, she interned for two judges at the Eleventh Judicial Circuit of Florida in Miami through the Princeton Internships in Civic Service (PICS) program.
“In composing my first legal memorandum for one of my judges, I began to notice parallels between the processes of translating classical texts and interpreting legal documents,” Eden said. “Both fields demand a delicate balance in interpretation, extracting core principles from complex texts. This is the work I have always loved to do in studying classics, and it is the kind of work I hope to continue in the legal profession.”
At Princeton, Eden has focused her scholarship and research in classical philosophy — an interest sparked while taking the summer seminar “Plato in Paris” taught by Professor of Philosophy Benjamin Morison. The class is held at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris and explores Plato’s “The Republic.” Students expand their understanding of the ancient work during cultural excursions throughout France.
“In that text, Plato argues that literature as we know it should be banned from an ideal society. Already back then Rosie was not satisfied with Plato’s argument,” said Morison, Eden’s thesis adviser. “Rosie returned to the argument in her senior thesis, taking it apart in minute detail, and unearthing aspects of the argument that I had never seen before — and I thought I knew ‘The Republic’ well! There is no better moment for a teacher than when your pupil starts teaching you new things.”
Eden’s senior thesis evaluates Socrates’ use of the painter-poet analogy in his critique of imitation in Book X of “The Republic.” The project dovetails with her junior independent work, which examined Socrates’ incorporation of Homeric quotations in “The Republic” and how the use of Homeric poetry fits within the text’s philosophical framework. She also wrote a second junior paper that analyzed conflicting portrayals of Helen of Troy in Homeric epic and ancient scholarship.
In addition to her independent projects, Eden participated in a fall 2022 Humanities Sequence trip to Greece to conduct research on the Parthenon Marbles, and she later presented her findings during a Princeton Humanities Council program. She spent last summer in Greece writing for Athens Voice through Princeton’s International Internship Program.
Professor of Classics Johannes Haubold said he is continually impressed with Eden, calling her a “talented and determined” student who immerses herself in her studies. “She always works extremely hard and will not let go of a subject until she has fully mastered it,” he said.
Haubold said he “distinctly remembers” Eden’s final exam in his intermediate Greek class focused on Book VI of Homer’s “Odyssey.”
“It was a truly wonderful performance and among the very best that I have seen in Princeton at this level,” he wrote in a letter of recommendation.
Eden is a member of the Behrman Undergraduate Society of Fellows, treasurer of the Princeton Classics Club and a member of the Princeton Pre-Law Society. She is also the director of outreach and communications for the Princeton Cycling Club, which she has helped grow over the last four years.
“My freshman year, there were only two of us traveling to the collegiate races every weekend. Since then, the club has seen so much growth and has fostered some of my most cherished friendships at Princeton,” she said. “During winter break of my junior year, I had the opportunity to host nine of us from the cycling team in my hometown for our winter training camp. This was one of my most meaningful experiences and I will miss this community immensely after I graduate.”
She is a student blogger for the undergraduate Office of Admission and was a satire writer for the Daily Princetonian. She is a member of Forbes College. She spent three years as a member of the student crew for Princeton Reunions, working at the 65th reunion.
“I love listening to some of our oldest alumni recount their memories from their years as undergraduates,” she said. “It is so bittersweet to be graduating from Princeton and I know I will miss this place so much.