It’s been a whirlwind month for Tanner Morrison, a recent graduate of Flathead Valley Community College.

After spring break, the mechanical engineering student traveled to Flagstaff, Ariz., then Bozeman, San Francisco and back to Bozeman for accolades, meetings, symposiums and presentations. The cherry on top was that the 20-year-old still taking all his classes, his finals and finally graduating.

Morrison was busy jet-setting thanks to his national award, the Coca-Cola New Century Scholarship, and his work on a solar spectrograph for the Montana Space Grant Consortium.

“It was rough,” he said. “But you’ve got to push through it. All engineering majors know that.”

He was one of Glacier High School’s first four-year group and had a path to Bozeman set out for him when he left high school. He was offered a scholarship for discus on Montana State University’s track and field team, but turned it down to attend FVCC.

“The main reason was the faculty,” Morrison said. “I would never have turned back on this decision.”

It has proven to be a fruitful decision, as he has made waves in the academic field from the Kalispell campus.

The space consortium invited research teams from universities across the country to build spectrographs as part of a NASA project, and after Morrison’s team won the Montana competition, it took on large research universities from elsewhere in the nation.

Morrison and his team of researchers (ranging in age from over 30 down to 12 years old) made a spectrograph that found the presence of chlorophyll in water, something that could help scientists detect contaminants in bodies of water.

Physics professor Jim Boger oversaw the team and was impressed with the improvement of FVCC over last year’s effort as well as the attitude of Morrison.

“They managed to do quite a bit better than last year,” he said. “Tanner is a high-energy individual and he manages to rise to the top of his class.”

Morrison has had an interest in mechanical engineering since before he knew what those words meant. He has always loved cars and as a child wanted to design them.

“I’ve never been good at English or history,” he said. “But math has always been second nature to me. I’ve always enjoyed it.”

That’s a benefit, because FVCC’s math, engineering and physics courses are challenging. Morrison pointed out one professor in particular, Effat Rady, who went out of her way to help FVCC students.

Rady, formerly an engineering professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been instrumental in the strength of the college’s engineering department.

“She’s so phenomenal at her job,” Morrison said. “She told us to call her anytime we had a question, she would drop dinner and help us.”

Under the tutelage of professors such as Rady and Boger, Morrison and students like him can sometimes challenge larger universities in science competitions.

Don Hickethier, a math professor at the college, was pleased with the results his students had been able to produce.

“Our sequence of physics, engineering and math course is fairly intense,” Hickethier said. “But our students tend to rise to the challenges we put in front of them. Tanner is just a great example of the entire class.”

Leland Fabel, John Rygg, Louis Grisez and Ian Caltabiano are the other members of the team, with specialized tasks that allowed for the spectrograph to be built and calibrated correctly. Also vital was FVCC’s machine shop, which made the pieces for the device.

It looks like a series of camera lenses and microscope cylinders, but it shoots light through water, and diffracts it so it can be analyzed for particulate in the liquid.

Grisez was Morrison’s traveling companion and will continue to be his friend and academic rival at Montana State next year, where the two will be roommates. He said the project was a daunting task from the beginning.

“It turned out to be more of an undertaking than anything we could have imagined,” Grisez said. “We have completely different personalities and we are always pushing each other to new heights, but also helping each other.”

Grisez and Morrison will begin classes in Bozeman this fall.

Reporter Ryan Murray may be reached at 758-4436 or by email at rmurray@dailyinterlake.com.