Five Princeton seniors have been awarded Gates Cambridge Scholarships, which give outstanding students from outside the United Kingdom an opportunity to pursue postgraduate study at the University of Cambridge.
Sara Asrat, Suneel Bhat, Christopher Bohn, Kara Gaston and Daniel Greco are among 40 U.S. winners of the Gates Cambridge Scholarships. Some 100 students from around the world receive the awards annually.
Asrat, who is from Buffalo, N.Y., is a history major and a candidate for a certificate in European cultural studies. At Cambridge, she plans to study modern European history.
Asrat is a member of Sustained Dialogue, a group dedicated to improving race relations at Princeton, and a member of the L'Atelier French theater group. She also is a junior fellow of the Human Values Forum and has served as a tutor for local schoolchildren. She spent the summer of 2004 studying the modern French short story and the history of the Provence region at the Institut d'Etudes Françaises d'Avignon.
Bhat, an ecology and evolutionary biology major from Clarksville, Md., will study epidemiology at Cambridge. He previously studied in England in the spring of 2005 as part of Princeton's exchange program with Oxford University.
Bhat has co-written several papers published in scientific journals. He is a member of the Student Health Advisory Board and has helped coordinate community service projects for the class of 2006. In the summer of 2004, Bhat worked in the rural village of Bangane, India, overseeing construction of a nursery school and conducting research on the links between nutrition, poverty and well-being.
Bohn, who is from Monument, Colo., is a chemical engineering major and a candidate for certificates in finance and bioengineering. He will pursue further studies in chemical engineering at Cambridge.
Among his activities at Princeton, Bohn has coordinated German-language story hours for the Cotsen Children's Library; worked as an editor and Web site manager for Business Today, a student-run business magazine; provided academic advising for freshmen as an undergraduate fellow at Mathey College; and performed with the Sympoh breakdancing troupe.
Gaston is an English major from Mariaville, Maine, who also is pursuing a certificate in medieval studies. Her area of study at Cambridge will be medieval and Renaissance literature.
In 2005, Gaston won the Emily Ebert Junior Prize for the best junior paper in English and the Class of 1870 Junior Prize as the top scholar of English literature in the junior class. She is a member of the women's track and field team and also spent three seasons on the women's cross-country squad.
Greco, a native of New York City, is a philosophy major who will continue his studies in that subject at Cambridge.
Greco has received the Shapiro Prize for Academic Excellence and several prizes for excellence in debate. He was president of the Princeton Debate Panel in 2004-05. Greco also has served as a peer academic adviser and spent the summer of 2003 in Italy as part of Princeton's Macerata Program for Italian Studies.
Including this year's winners, 16 Princeton students have been named Gates Cambridge Scholars since the awards were established in 2001 through a $210 million donation to the University of Cambridge from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Scholars are selected on the basis of intellectual ability, leadership potential and desire to improve the lives of others.
