Northfield, Minn.–– Six Carleton College students, including five members of the class of 2012, have been awarded highly competitive Fulbright Fellowships to pursue graduate work abroad.
The recipients include: Katie Deeg ’12 (Zionsville, Ind.), Elizabeth Durham ’12 (Ottawa Hills, Ohio), Zach Hyman ’08 (East Hampton, N.Y.), Grace Ogilby ’12 (Belmont, Mass.), Jesse Pittman ‘12 (Annapolis, Md.), and Jake Reznick ‘12 (New York).
Deeg, who graduated in June 2012 as a chemistry major, is also a National Science Fellow and will begin studies for her Ph.D. in chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, in fall 2013. With her Fulbright grant this coming school year, she will be doing research as a member of a computational chemistry group at the University Pablo de Olavide in Seville, Spain. She plans to join in the group’s research using molecular simulations to study and design multifunctional nanostructured materials and complex molecules.
Durham, who graduated this past June with a sociology/anthropology major and a concentration in French/Francophone studies, plans to travel to Dschang, Cameroon, to conduct anthropological research on the Bamileke people's attitudes regarding HIV/AIDS and anti-HIV/AIDS programs. “The Cameroonian government has recently legalized traditional ethnic medicines in the fight against HIV/AIDS, and it will be interesting to see whether this shift in medical policy leads to a shift in social relations,” she said. She hopes her work will lead to the creation of more culturally sensitive and effective anti-HIV/AIDS programs.
Hyman, a rare political science/international relations/Chinese triple major at Carleton, will be studying the different processes and patterns of user-led innovation around tractor-like vehicles across both rural and urbanizing China “I hope to understand how people use and modify some of the over 25 million highly-flexible vehicles for such diverse activities as powering irrigation systems, delivering drinking water to households, generating electricity, ferrying people, and transporting all manner of cargo, from crops to construction materials,” he said. For frequent updates on his research efforts and glimpses of other resource-constrained innovation he has encountered around the world, check out Hyman's website.
Reznick, an environment studies major, will be using the grant to research water conservation and resource management in Chin’s Yunnan Province. He will work with the Asian International Resource Center to study efficient agricultural practices that have existed in the Yunnan Province for thousands of years. He will also explore the ways in which China might avoid conflict with its neighbors, and he hopes that his research will be applicable to the United States’ own struggles with water management.
(Ogilby, who majored in political science, and Pittman, an American studies and educational studies double major, did not submit descriptions of their proposed programs for this release.)
Fulbright Fellowship award winners are selected on the basis of personal qualifications, academic record, and the value of the proposed project or study. The Fulbright Program is a federally funded exchange program that sponsors approximately 7,500 scholars annually. Recipients travel to over 155 nations around the world, with the mission of “increasing mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries.”
