“Guess what?” Brian Wagner heard his son calling from the passenger seat of their parked, gray RAV4 in May. The duo was prepped and ready for a long drive, and Nathan Wagner was sporting his best poker face.
“He made me guess like two or three times, and I didn’t know,” Brian chuckles. “I had no idea what he was going to tell me.”
After a couple “really ridiculous” guesses and one “just tell me,” Nathan revealed what. He read the words gleaming off Outlook mobile: “Based upon exemplary academic performance, ingenuity, and unique aptitude for research, you have been selected by the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation to join the elite group of Astronaut Scholars for the 2025-2026 academic school year.” Nathan was one of two UW-Madison students to win the award.
The Astronaut Scholarship is one of the most prestigious undergraduate awards in the United States. Funded by the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation (ASF), it aims to inspire the next generation of scientific innovators and explorers by honoring outstanding students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).
Nathan is currently a rising senior studying math and physics and is an experienced researcher. As an 11th grader at Madison West High School, Nathan reached out to Professor Mark Saffman, the Johannes Rydberg Professor of Physics and director of the Wisconsin Quantum Institute, about a summer lab internship. Saffman’s research group operates where atomic physics meets quantum information science. Their primary focus is quantum computing, an incredibly important field of research. There are many calculations involved in designing new chemicals, new materials and new medicines that are not possible even on the fastest computers that exist today. Quantum computing research evokes the potential to solve these problems exponentially faster, and UW–Madison’s Department of Physics is a world leader in developing integral components (qubits) for quantum computers. Over the past 20 years, Saffman has only mentored a handful of high school students, but in the summer of 2021, Nathan stood out to him.
“Nathan quickly impressed me as a remarkable young man and budding researcher,” Saffman says.
Nathan’s research project revolved around testing the efficacy of quantum computers. Nathan continued this work until the fall of his sophomore year in college, when he completed the corresponding research paper, which he submitted to the Journal of Quantum Science and Technology at the end of 2023.
“Nathan has really been exceptional,” Saffman says. “His ability, knowledge and work ethic are head and shoulders above anything I experienced before for a high school student. He exudes a strong passion to excel in physics and learn as much as he can. Having a paper submitted as a sophomore that he is first author on, and did the bulk of the work on, is an excellent start to a research career.”
But Nathan’s “unique aptitude for research” — as ASF would call it — started much sooner. He first discovered this passion in Madison West High School’s Rocket Club.
“Something about working in the lab, building rockets and walking out into the cornfields of Illinois to retrieve pieces of rockets that have exploded in the air — that experimental nature is kind of like Nathan’s first physics [experience],” his mother Dawn Wagner says.
As a ninth grader, Nathan and his team took first place at the world’s largest student rocket competition: the American Rocketry Challenge (ARC). Teams design, build, test and launch model rockets to meet rigorous requirements and to return all egg-passengers safely to the ground. ARC promotes leadership, teamwork and problem-solving skills as students gain hands-on engineering experience.
ARC and ASF are similar in their aim to inspire up-and-coming STEM students. They both have strong ties to NASA and highlight a strong sense of community, which is Nathan’s favorite part.
ASF was founded in 1986 by the original Mercury astronauts, but it has since grown into a massive and well-connected nonprofit organization. Nathan’s scholarship also includes a trip to Houston for the Innovators Symposium & Gala, an Astronaut Scholar conference, a mentoring opportunity by a scholar alum, a professional development program and a life-long bond with the Foundation and other Astronaut Scholars.
“On a personal level, it stands out to be a part of a community like that, a great community of scholars and of people who are willing to help each other,” says Nathan. “I think the mentorship — the capacity to be able to meet with a lot of people who have been a part of this community, who have received this award and gone on to do incredible work — I think that’s invaluable.”
The 2019 ARC final granted Nathan and his teammates an identically invaluable experience. The winning team had the opportunity to compete in the International Rocketry Challenge, an elite competition between national champions of various countries. The kids were excited to fly to Paris and represent the U.S. the year of the 50th anniversary of the moon landing. The kids were even more excited when they got to have lunch with Apollo 15 Astronaut, Alfred Worden.
“I had the honor of sitting next to him,” Nathan says. “It was really cool to hear about his life story and how he got where he got as an astronaut, flying to the moon. … That was really inspiring for me to be able to have a chat about it, ask for advice and hear words of wisdom he’d learned from these extraordinary experiences.”
One such insight from Worden was that life wasn’t really worth living, in his opinion, unless it was to the benefit of fellow humankind.
And current-day, incoming Astronaut-Scholar Nathan Wagner aspires to do just that, by pursuing a professional research career in quantum physics.
“I would like to be able to contribute to physics in a way that people can look at a specific appliance or specific something that was made with the quantum computer and be happy that it was done in that manner,” he says. “No matter what research I end up doing, I want to be in a place where I will be able to have a direct contribution to people’s lives.”
He is particularly drawn toward the subfield of atomic, molecular and optical physics (AMO).
“There is something very exciting about exploring the fundamental principles of nature, what makes our universe tick,” says Nathan. “And it all happens at the quantum level, where discoverable things are happening well below the surface of what we can see … which are many times counterintuitive to what we might expect.”
Nathan first realized that physics was something he wanted to pursue with a Badger Pre-College course: Physics of the Impossible. He was in 10th grade and had taken math and science classes before, but this one was uniquely granular. This one covered more than concept overviews – it actually dove into mathematical techniques used by physicists.
“It was actually like taking the rules of quantum mechanics and putting those together to get stuff that we see in nature,” Nathan says. “That’s what really interested me about that class. It gave me very new insight into how physics is actually done under the hood.”
Before the gray RAV4, the Wagner mobile was an older and bluer RAV4. The moment that sparked this Astronaut Scholar’s love of math — that would turn into an eidetic memory — happened in the back seat of the latter. The smaller-statured version of the same quick-witted, curious-minded Nathan had just read a Calvin and Hobbes comic strip about imaginary numbers. It was the summer before third grade. His dad was driving.
“Imaginary numbers can’t be real?” Nathan — who was eight at the time — half jokingly asked his father. His poker face was a work in progress. He was clearly floored at the revelation that the “numbers” were, in fact, real concepts.
Nathan has since become more familiar with abstract mathematics and is devoted to a research career in physics. This year, he was one of the 74 scholarship awardees selected from a nation-wide pool of applicants.
“It was stressful, in that it was a pretty big thing to apply for and go into,” Nathan says. “But it was something that really helped build up my confidence to do it and be able to say I put my best into it.”
All told, the 150-plus hours poured into coordinating the exhaustive process were well worth it.
“When I got the email, it was a sense of shock and disbelief. It felt like a culmination of a lot of hard work that I’d done for all this time, and it was incredibly humbling.”
After Nathan shared the astounding update with his father, both Wagners leaped out of the gray RAV4, co-initiating a hug-and-jumping combo in the middle of the parking lot.
“I just want to say, I mean it seems self-explanatory, but I’m just super proud of Nathan,” Brian says, visibly beaming. “We knew that he was going to be great in a vast number of things, even when he was little. And it’s been really a joy and an honor to watch him grow.”
Nicholas Rienstra, a senior in the UW-Madison Department of Mechanical Engineering's Engineering Mechanics (+Aerospace option) bachelor’s program, is the other UW student to win the Astronaut Scholarship. You can read his story here.