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Prior days' news: By date | Search This week's print issue Back issues: By date | Search April 19, 2007Matthew G. GwaltneyMany undergraduates at Virginia Tech remember Matthew G. Gwaltney, a graduate student in civil and environmental engineering, as the teaching assistant who would stick it out for hours in the rain to help students in outdoor labs he oversaw and who laughed so hard at classroom jokes that his face turned bright red. Mr. Gwaltney, 24, was an only child from Chester, Va., whose research focused on storm-water management and how to predict droughts. He had earned a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from Virginia Tech in 2005.  Christine Vineski, a freshman who had Mr. Gwaltney as a teaching assistant in an engineering class this semester, saw him in her early-morning lecture class the day he died. “Matt was just an amazing teacher and an incredible person,” she writes in an e-mail message. He was always quick to notice students who needed assistance, she says, such as the time she struggled during a lab to properly wire a circuit. He instantly came over to her and spent more than 10 minutes helping her. She remembers the way, last winter, he tied the string on the hood of his big maroon Virginia Tech jacket so tight that “he reminded me of Kenny from South Park” the animated television series. On a memorial page established for Mr. Gwaltney on Facebook, a friend who lived across the hall from him in their freshman year at Virginia Tech wrote of his passion for sports. Chris Hawkins said that his friend never missed Hokies football or basketball games when they were undergraduates and that he was also a devoted fan of the Atlanta Braves. “He was always smiling and had an almost unreal sense of being positive about everything,” wrote Mr. Hawkins. A high-school classmate described Mr. Gwaltney’s “competitive drive.” Ryan Graves recalled a gym class in which Mr. Gwaltney beat him in a left-handed, three-point basketball-shooting contest. “And I’m the one who’s actually left-handed!” Mr. Graves wrote. “Made me look like a chump, ha ha. I’ll really miss you man.” —Sara Hebel Posted on Thursday April 19, 2007 | Permalink | |