Scripps students continue to earn top honors for their scholarship and proposed research. To date, Scripps women have been awarded two Fulbright scholarships, a Truman scholarship, a Goldwater scholarship and two honorable mentions, a Davis Peace Award, and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.
Fulbright scholar Ivy McDaniel ’08 will travel to Bergen, Norway, for a 10-month appointment to conduct research at the Sars International Centre for Marine Molecular Biology. Laura McPherson ’08 will use her Fulbright award to pursue linguistic fieldwork on the little known Tommo-So language spoken in the Dogon region of Mali.
Maile Yeats ’09 has been named a Truman Scholar for her senior year and will receive a $30,000 scholarship to attend the graduate program of her choice. Yeats is one of only 65 Truman Scholars nationwide and the sole winner from The Claremont Colleges this year. Yeats plans to do graduate work in international development as it applies to national defense policy.
Laura Loesch ’09, a neuroscience and humanities major, has been named a Barry M. Goldwater Scholar for 2008.The scholarship is considered the most prestigious award in the United States bestowed upon undergraduates studying in the sciences. In addition to Loesch, Clio Korn ’10 and Vivian Lin ’09, neuroscience and biology-chemistry majors respectively, received honorable mentions.
Fatima Elkabti ’09 received the Davis Peace Award, given to students who seek to promote world peace through international projects. Elkabti will travel to the West Bank in June to establish a series of writing workshops to connect a group of American children with their Palestinian peers.
Two recent graduates and one student have received recognition from the National Science Foundation. Sarah J. Freed ’06 has been awarded an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, which provides three years of funding for research-focused master’s and PhD degrees in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics; she is studying environmental sciences at Portland State University. The NSF gave honorable mention for their academic accomplishments to Claire Knezevic ’08, who will pursue graduate studies in organic chemistry next year at University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, and to Erin Kirkbride ’04, who is doing graduate work in molecular biology at UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute.
In addition, five Scripps students received the Stanley and Mary Johnson Student Research Awards for summer 2008. Clio Korn ’10 will study how cultural differences affect the transmission of knowledge, while working in Uganda. Jenna Leahy ’10 will travel to Mexico and Senegal this summer and fall to examine how religion empowers women in third-world countries. Emily Luttrull ’10 will evaluate how the city of Pomona uses community organizing to instill hope in its people; subsequently, she plans to employ this knowledge to contribute to the city’s current organizing efforts. Sarah Pripas ’09 will use her award to research autism from a historical and sociological perspective. Duyen Tran ’10 will investigate HIV/AIDS stigma and discrimination in Vietnam.