Spotlight

Top Tier Scholars

By Ann Carney | USF News

For students at USF, it was a year of notable firsts — a prestigious Marshall Scholarship, a highly selective Udall Scholarship, two extremely competitive Fulbright Scholarships for postgraduate study in the United Kingdom, two undergraduate Fulbright Scholarships also in the U.K., and the university's largest-ever group of postgraduate scholars.

The "firsts" were just the tip of the iceberg in a year of remarkable scholarly accomplishments that included a total of seven Fulbright Scholarships, a Goldwater Scholarship, three Hollings Scholarships, a Critical Language Scholarship, 14 Gilman Scholarships, two Presidential Management Fellows, two Florida Gubernatorial Fellowships and a number of other top-tier scholarships.

"Clearly our strategic emphasis on student success has taken root and is bearing handsome results," says USF Provost and Executive Vice President Ralph Wilcox.

Marshall Scholarship - Jean Weatherwax

Senior electrical engineering major and Honors College student Jean Weatherwax is among 37 American college students awarded a Marshall Scholarship this year, and the first USF student ever.

The award will pay for postgraduate biomedical studies at Imperial College London where Weatherwax will work with Dr. Pantelis Georgiou to develop the first artificial pancreas for treating Type I diabetes. In 2011, Weatherwax was awarded a Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship, the nation's highest honor for science undergrads, and she was a NASA MUST scholar with internships in the summer. Each year Marshall scholarships finance about 40 young Americans of high ability to study in the United Kingdom.

Udall Scholarship - Shaza Hussein

Honors College junior Shaza Hussein is one of just 80 undergraduate students in the nation, and the only one in Florida, to receive a Udall Scholarship.

The $5,000 award, a first for USF, will support Hussein's environmental research. Hussein, who was awarded a Hollings Scholarship last year, will spend the summer in Maine as an intern at the Wells National Estuarine Research Reserve. She previously interned at the National Weather Service in Tampa. Udall scholarships are awarded annually to sophomore and junior level college students committed to careers in the environment, tribal public policy or Native American healthcare.

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