Three Women Named Churchill Scholars

The Winston Churchill Foundation of the United States was established in 1959 and in 1963 it began giving out graduate student scholarships to Cambridge University in England to Americans who studied in the sciences. Today, the foundation offers 14 full scholarships each year for students to pursue graduate studies in the sciences at Cambridge University. Winners of the scholarships receive full tuition, travel and living expenses, fees to cover visas and other travel documents, and a stipend for their spouse if they are married.

This year, three of the 14 winners of the Churchill Scholarships are women.

MurphyKate Montee is a double major in music and mathematics at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. She was the winner of the 2013 Alice T. Schafer Mathematics Prize, an award given by the Assoication for Women in Mathematics to only one woman undergraduate student each year in the United States. Her senior thesis is entitled, “On the Construction of the Chern Classes of Complex Vector Bundles.” In music, she concentrates on vocal performance.

Kavitha Anandalingam is a senior at Yale University, where she is majoring in biomedical engineering. Her undergraduate research is focused on a new gene therapy technique for sufferers of cystic fibrosis. At Cambridge she plans to conduct research concentrating on the development of neural prosthetic devices that can perform the functions of limbs lost to injury or disease.

Lay Kodama, from Columbus, Ohio, is a senior at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. At Cambridge she will study in the department of physiology, development, and neuroscience. Her undergraduate research has focused on the effect of dopamine on the feeding of flies. She also is a member of the Johns Hopkins University orchestra and plays the violin. Kodama plans to become a physician scientist and to work on enhancing care for victims of stroke.