Student Awards

Rice students again have earned a number of prestigious awards that allow them to pursue scholarship in the humanities and sciences.

Four 2004 graduates will study or work abroad through the Fulbright Scholars Program: Steven Parker, Tanvir Hussain, Sirish Kishore, and Mariel Davenport Pollock.

Parker, who received his master’s degree in trombone performance, will be studying at the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik in Trossingen, Germany. He will work on experimental techniques for the trombone, including singing while playing, vocalizing techniques, mute experimentation, and incorporating dance, theater, and video into performances. Parker also will examine why classical music is so much more successful in Germany than in the United States.

Hussain received a Fulbright to the United Kingdom, where he will be studying for a master’s of science in social epidemiology at University College London. A relatively new field, social epidemiology involves the study of how social conditions like race, gender, income, and religion affect health outcomes. “This program is one of the first of its kind in the entire world, and I will be among the first 15 in the world to receive such a degree,” he explains. After receiving his master’s, Hussain will pursue an MD/PhD at Columbia University.

Kishore will be studying in Barcelona with an interdisciplinary and multinational group. He will be investigating the interaction of tobacco use and genetic background in the progression of bladder cancer.

Davenport Pollock earned a Fulbright Teaching Fellowship that will take her to France, where she will teach English to high school students in Versailles.

Martha Jeong also was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship but declined the award to pursue other opportunities.

When Tim Perkins was 11 years old, he spent an entire family trip to a park identifying birds and has been hooked on bird-watching ever since. This summer, he’ll turn his weekend hobby into a full-fledged research opportunity. Perkins was one of three 2004 graduating seniors at Rice to receive a $22,000 Watson Fellowship. The students each will use the stipend to travel outside the United States to conduct independent study projects.

Perkins will study present-day bird extinction in Latin America. He plans to follow various threatened species to identify the factors that play a direct role in the sustainability struggle.

“I will also look at the impact of foreign bird-watchers,” Perkins says. “They could provide incentive for locals to preserve the bird habitat, or they may cause disturbances that possibly have a destructive impact on the bird populations.”

Jeff Bishop will be looking at electricity programs using renewable energy in Botswana and Uganda. He wants to examine the socio-cultural, technical, and organizational factors that led to the demise of each country’s pilot electricity program.

“I find the organizational factors the most interesting because there has been no way set up to replace parts in the system,” Bishop says. “I hope to find out why these systems have failed in the past and how to avoid the problems in the future.”

Bishop said he became interested in renewable “green” energy two years ago when he worked as an intern for a Rice alumnus. He plans to give his findings to contacts in foreign governments that he met through his intern position.

Meanwhile, Caroline Shaw will travel to France, England, and Italy to study various garden styles and concepts. She plans to compose music for a string quartet based on the aesthetics she experiences.
“I’ll be spending most of my time taking photos and sketching,” she notes. “It’s the kind of project with no right or wrong way to complete it. This project is very seasonal, though, with the gardens each blooming at a certain time.”

A composer since she was 10 years old, Shaw said a great masterpiece isn’t her objective for this project. “The point is to be alone for 12 months and figure myself out as a musician, as well as a composer,” she says. “I haven’t been able to write music in a long time, and I’m excited to find a system and motivation in which to write.”

In July, Ryan Giles ’04 began a year following the footsteps of the Spanish explorer Vasco Da Gama.

As a recipient of the Roy and Hazel Zeff Memorial Fellowship, Giles started his journey in Portugal, where he will stay for five months to learn about the culture. That experience will serve as his point of reference as he looks for evidence of Portuguese influence in Cape Verde, Mozambique, and Goa, India.

The Zeff Fellowship was established in 2002 by Stephen Zeff, the Herbert S. Autrey Professor of Accounting at the Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Management. The fellowship, which is named in honor of Zeff’s parents, is given to the Rice student who received the most votes for a Watson nomination but did not receive the award. Like the Watson Fellowship, the Zeff gives the recipient $22,000 to travel outside the United States for one year to work on a research project.

After spending five months in Portugal, Giles will travel to the Cape Verde Islands for three months to learn the language and study cultural differences in various holidays. “I want to learn how the Portuguese culture was adopted in different colonies along the voyage,” Giles says. “I’ll look at how colonization changed the culture and how that’s played out in postcolonial times.”

From Cape Verde, he’ll travel to South Africa to study the legacy left by Da Gama outside the colonial boundaries. Moving on to Mozambique, he will compare the degree of adaptation and rejection between Maputo and Mozambique islands. Giles will end his trip in Goa on the west coast of India. He plans to investigate the Goan trend to promote the Portuguese heritage to draw tourism.

“I’ve always been interested in colonial expansion, particularly Spanish and Portuguese,” he says. “I really hope to understand the people I’ve read about for so long and fill in the blanks with a sense of who these people are.”

— Reported by Linsdey Fielder