Honors & Awards

Students Earn Goldwaters, Fulbrights

Several Rochester students have earned national honors this spring in recognition of their work.

Kristin Beck ’09, who is pursuing a degree in physics and a degree in mathematics, Kathryn Knowles ’08, a dual-degree student in chemistry and math, and Andrew Niles ’08, a mathematics major, have been selected as 2007 Barry M. Goldwater Scholars.

The congressionally endowed scholarship recognizes about 300 outstanding students nationwide who are interested in pursuing careers in science, math, and engineering.

Also this spring, several students learned they had received Fulbright scholarships to study abroad in 2007–08.

Michael Potere ’07, a political science major, will spend the next academic year teaching conversational English in a rural province of Malaysia. He’s the University’s first Fulbright scholar to teach in the Southeast Asian country.

Alexandra (Sasha) Bilow ’07, a double major in French and Spanish, will study and teach in France during her Fulbright year.

Ayman Bekdash ’07, a double major in history and political science who is also pursuing a degree in neuroscience, will study the process of democraticization in Jordan.

Jill Thorson ’05, a graduate student in linguistics, will spend her year in Barcelona, where she will conduct research on Spanish and Catalan intonation.

Philip Brune ’04, ’06 (MS), a Ph.D. student in mechanical engineering, will conduct research in Italy as Rochester’s first engineering graduate student to earn a Fulbright.

Adam Peithmann ’07E, an organ performance major, has been awarded a Fulbright to study in Bremen, Germany.

And John Koslovsky, a Ph.D. candidate in music theory at the Eastman School, has received a Fulbright to travel to Vienna, where he will research the life and work of Austrian-born musicologist Felix Salzer.

—Enid Arbelo