Eight Women Named Luce Scholars

The Henry Luce Foundation, established in 1936 by Henry R. Luce, the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Time magazine to honor his parents who were missionary educators in China, recently announced its 2013-14 class of Luce Scholars. The Luce Scholars Program is a nationally competitive fellowship program. It was launched by the Henry Luce Foundation in 1974 to enhance the understanding of Asia among potential leaders in American society. The program provides stipends, language training, and individualized professional placement in Asia for 15 to 18 Luce Scholars each year, and welcomes applications from college seniors, graduate students, and young professionals in a variety of fields who have had limited exposure to Asia. Luce scholars spend a year in Asia on a wide variety of projects, with their expenses paid by the foundation.

This year 18 students were selected as Luce Scholars and eight of them are women.

(L to R) Samantha G. Chadwick, Claire Duvallet, Eryn R. Eby, Genevieve E. Gebhart, Megan Mills-Novoa, Aya Saed, Tamara T. Shogaolu, and Tarlise Townsend

Samantha G. Chadwick is a graduate research assistant with the Rail Transportation and Engineering Center at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in civil engineering from the university. Her research is focused on improving safety at highway-rail grade crossings.

Claire Duvallet is a senior at Columbia University in New York City, where she is majoring in biomedical engineering. Her goal is to pursue a Ph.D. at the intersection of engineering and global health. In the spring 2011 semester, she studied abroad at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.

Eryn R. Eby, a native of Anchorage, Alaska, is a senior at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington, where he is majoring in politics and government. This past summer she founded and ran Camp ARCTIC (Arthritis Can’t Tame my Independence and Courage), the first summer camp and community for children with arthritis in Alaska.

Genevieve E. Gebhart is a senior at the University of Washington, completing work on a degree in international studies and economics. Her senior honors thesis is on Italian film and she spent the recent winter quarter in Italy conducting research. She hopes to study for a career in information justice and international librarianship.

Megan Mills-Novoa is a 2009 graduate of Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon, with a degree in environmental studies and conservation biology. In 2011 Mills-Novoa worked as a Fulbright research fellow at the Centro de Cambio Global in Santiago, Chile, researching the impact of climate change on vineyards in Central Chile. Currently, she is the Hunger Education Coordinator at the Food Bank of the Southern Tier in upstate New York.

Aya Saed was born to Nubian parents in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and has lived in Khartoum, Sudan, and Washington, D.C. She is a senior in international relations at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. She is a blogger for the Huffington Post and a writer for the Daily Pennsylvanian, the student newspaper at Penn.

Tamara T. Shogaolu is a 2008 graduate of Occidental College in Los Angeles. She is currently completing a master of fine arts degree in film and television production at the University of Southern California. She is currently producing and directing a short animated documentary film and interactive media project on experiences of Egyptian women during the January 2011 revolution and in the post-Mubarak era.

Tarlise Townsend is a 2012 graduate of Indiana University, where she majored in neuroscience and Germanic studies. She has spent the past year at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, Germany, as a visiting researcher. She plans to pursue a career in global and environmental health.