Awards Recognize Students’
Academic Might

Rice students are among the best and the brightest in the country, as shown once again by the number of prestigious scholarships and awards they won in 2005.

Rice students Julia Follick, Megan Levin, and Anthony Potoczniak will live, work, and study abroad next year, thanks to the Fulbright Program for U.S. Students.

Only about 600 Fulbrights are awarded nationally each year to graduating seniors and graduate students who are U.S. citizens. Awards are based on the applicant’s personal statement, proposed project, transcript, faculty recommendations, and a language exam, if applicable. Each scholarship covers one year of university study and research abroad.

Follick plans to work and study in Germany during her Fulbright teaching assistantship. While studying there as an undergraduate, she met many Germans whose less-than-favorable opinions about Americans were based on outdated textbooks or poorly trained nonnative English teachers. As a teacher in the German schools, the May graduate hopes to counter German prejudices against Americans, starting with secondary-school students. Follick also will take German-language classes at a local university to strengthen her language skills and sit in on American studies classes to hear what German students are being taught about the United States. She hopes to gain useful ideas to implement in her own classroom.

Levin, a graduate of the Shepherd School of Music, has been working to become an orchestral harpist for most of her life, and the Fulbright grant will help her merge this goal with her love of Paris. She will spend the year abroad studying at the Ecole Normale de Musique de Paris under professor of harp Madame Perrin. The French approach to playing an instrument is emotion-driven, Levin explains. She hopes to make her music more personal, intense, and meaningful. At the same time, she’ll experience life in Paris as a full-time resident, not simply a tourist.

Potoczniak, a graduate student in anthropology, will travel to Ukraine to examine how folk songs are transformed into cultural commodities in the post-Soviet economy. He plans to study how experts at four state institutions archive Ukrainian folk music. His specific interest is in how everyday scientific research practices, as they relate to folk music, are influenced by social, political, and economic constraints at local and national levels.

Two 2005 graduates—Grace Lin and Mark Pond—were selected to participate in the Beckman Scholars Program. The highly competitive program provides funding—$17,600 per student—for research by undergraduate students in the areas of chemistry, biochemistry, and the biological and medical sciences, or some combination of these subjects. Research is conducted during two full-time summer research sessions and a part-time research session during one academic year.

Working in the lab of Bonnie Bartel, professor of biochemistry and cell biology, Lin is researching hormone response defects in mutants of the plant Arabidopsis thaliana. She is working on isolating mutants that suppress resistance to auxin, a phytohormone involved in plant growth and stress responses. By eventually cloning the gene responsible for resistance, she hopes to identify key proteins of the elusive auxin signaling mechanism. A clearer understanding of the auxin signaling pathway could have major agricultural implications.

Pond is researching the triggered disassembly of TiO2 nanoparticle-assembled capsules (NACs) in the lab of Michael Wong, assistant professor in chemical and biomolecular engineering. Pond hopes to engineer a mechanism for the triggered disassembly of the NACs and then use it to work on controlled release of material stored within the center of hollow NACs.

The scholars will continue their research through next summer, when they will join other Beckman Scholars for a research symposium at the Beckman Center of the National Academies of Sciences and Engineering in Irvine, California. The Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation gives the awards to program-related, nonprofit research institutions to encourage research in chemistry and life science. Established in 1997, the Beckman Scholars Program to date has awarded fellowships to 413 students—four from Rice.

Hanszen College junior Nastassja Lewinski was one of 320 undergraduate sophomores and juniors in the United States this year awarded a nationally competitive Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship. It was awarded based on her plans to work in the field of scoliosis research. Since 2002, Lewinski has been working in the lab of Rebekah Drezek, the Stanley C. Moore Assistant Professor of Bioengineering and assistant professor in electrical and computer engineering. Lewinski currently is the George R. Brown Undergraduate Research Assistant studying the fluorescent properties of type I collagen gels.

She also spent nine weeks during the summer participating in Washington Internship for Students of Engineering (WISE), where she learned how government officials make decisions on complex technological issues and how engineers can contribute to legislative and regulatory public policy decisions. The WISE program is ranked one of the 100 best internship opportunities in the United States by the Princeton Review. Lewinski plans to pursue both an MD and a PhD to research improvements in scoliosis prevention and management.

The Goldwater Foundation is a federally endowed agency established in 1986. Scholars were selected on the basis of academic merit from a field of students in mathematics, science, and engineering who were nominated by the faculties of universities nationwide. The award covers the cost of tuition, fees, books, and room and board for one to two years.

Seven Rice students will spend the next academic year studying abroad, each having earned a Wagoner Foreign Studies Scholarship.

Brown College junior Nancy Brown, an English major, will attend Queen Mary University in London to study literature in the modernist period, a time of tremendous progress and upheaval in the arts and politics. Shepherd School student Shawn Conley plans to spend a year in Paris studying the bass with famed musician Francois Rabbath. Rice graduate Natilee Harren will study 20th-century performance history and its critical theory at the London Consortium. She wants to investigate works that challenge the boundaries of performance and study art history.

Ryan Foster, a graduate student in history, will travel to Potsdam, Germany, to collect the necessary archival materials to write the first contextual study of Joseph von Schelling’s most mature work, Naturphilosophie. Wiess College senior Searcy Milam plans to take Spanish literature courses in Spain and incorporate the language, culture, tradition, and literary style into his own writing. Elitza Ranova, a graduate student in anthropology, will travel to Bulgaria to conduct research for her dissertation. Her anthropological fieldwork will focus on lifestyle and consumption changes as they relate to the postsocialist country’s political transition. Recent graduate Laura Sawyer will spend the next year at the University of Cape Town in South Africa studying the AIDS epidemic in that country, with a particular focus on the connection between religion and the epidemic.

The Wagoner Foreign Studies Scholarships are awarded to Rice undergraduate and graduate students who demonstrate scholastic achievement, dedication, and character. Rice established the scholarships in 1997 through provisions made by the late James T. Wagoner ’29, who took his first trip abroad after graduating from Rice and enjoyed extensive world travel during his retirement.

This summer, Wiess College senior Emily Matuzek embarked on a yearlong journey to research how other countries treat autistic children. As a recipient of the Roy and Hazel Zeff Memorial Fellowship, Matuzek is visiting Denmark, India, and Chile to examine the diagnosis, treatment, and education process for autism in each country. She chose those three countries because of their different approaches to diagnosing and treating the disease.

The Zeff Fellowship was created by Stephen Zeff, the Herbert S. Autrey Professor of Accounting at the Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Management, for the Rice student who received the most votes to be nominated for a Watson Fellowship but did not receive the award. Both the Zeff and Watson fellowships give students about $22,000 to travel abroad and spend one year working on a research project.

By their record of accomplishment at Rice University, 68 May graduates qualified for membership in Phi Beta Kappa. Election to Phi Beta Kappa is a significant honor recognizing outstanding achievement in the liberal arts and sciences. To be considered for membership, a student at Rice must have completed at least 90 semester hours in courses that reflect the pursuit of learning for its own sake, rather than a focus on the development of particular professional skills. As an additional indication of intellectual breadth, at least 10 of these qualifying courses must be chosen from outside the division in which the student’s major lies.

—Reported by Lindsey Fielder and Linda Williams