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Three of 18: Carolina Stands Out in Luce Scholarships

Two UNC students and an alumna have received three of 18 Luce Scholarships awarded nationwide for 2009.

Seniors Nicholas Buell Anderson of Weston, Ct., and Rachel Alison Harper of Cary and Jennifer Ellen Cimaglia ’07 of Suwanee, Ga., won the scholarships from the Henry Luce Foundation in New York.

The Luce funds a year of living and learning in East Asia and Southeast Asia for recent college graduates with no prior experience of the continent. The foundation’s goal is to connect future American leaders with Asian colleagues in their fields. Selection criteria include outstanding academic achievement and leadership ability.

The three recipients pull Carolina past Harvard to become first in the nation in the number of Luce Scholars since the program began in 1974. Since then, the foundation has chosen 31 Carolina students for the honor. This year, 55 colleges and universities nationwide nominated 111 candidates for the Luce.

Only three times in the program’s 35 years has one school had three recipients, and Carolina is the first public institution to do so.

The value of the award varies by assignment. The scholars will learn their assignments in June, spend part of the summer in language study and start their 10-month internships in September.

Nicholas Buell Anderson

Anderson received a Robertson Scholarship, a four-year merit award to study and participate in a leadership development program at both Carolina and Duke University. Anderson is based at Carolina.

A public policy major, he has been on the dean’s list every semester at UNC and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa.

The Robertson Scholars Program operates buses between the two campuses; Anderson researched and wrote a plan for offsetting the bus emissions. As a result, the program now purchases carbon credits from two projects. One captures methane from a South Carolina landfill. The second allows trucks to connect to a power grid at a rest stop so that they don’t idle their engines.

Anderson began his honors thesis last summer, living with an indigenous tribe in Brazil. In the past, colonists had cleared much of the area for agriculture. Anderson sought to connect the tribe’s chief with organizations that would finance a reforesting project. This not only would restore the forest but also create sustainable livelihoods for the community and reduce the world’s carbon emissions.

Through study abroad, Anderson spent fall 2007 in Chile, where he researched copper mining and wrote a plan in Spanish for improving the industry’s impacts on the country’s economy. He presented his findings to the Chilean Copper Commission.

Anderson won three grants to fund volunteer work in Argentina, where he implemented an infrastructure, nutrition and solar project at a rural school in summer 2007.

He co-founded and leads the Durham Teachers Warehouse. The storefront nonprofit has provided approximately $70,000 in school supplies to some 500 needy classrooms in Durham. StartingBloc, an organization that advocates social entrepreneurship by emerging leaders, awarded him a fellowship that took him to Columbia, New York and Yale universities to study for part of last year.

After his year in Asia, Anderson hopes to attend law school. Another goal is to found a lending nonprofit to empower environmental entrepreneurs.

“I would provide seed loans and management support to low-income aspiring entrepreneurs who want to start companies in residential weatherization, sustainable agriculture, green construction and more,” he said.

Jennifer Ellen Cimaglia

Cimaglia studied classical archaeology, earning a bachelor’s degree. Now she is one of only four American interns with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization in Paris, for which she has a Fulbright Fellowship.

She came to Carolina on a Morehead-Cain Scholarship. Through her second Morehead-Cain summer experience, in 2004, Cimaglia discovered a passion for archaeology. Working with excavations in Crete and Italy, she said, “I found coins, jewelry, keys and even bones. I was hooked.”

The next summer, Cimaglia studied Spanish and the tango while conducting research in Argentina and Uruguay. She is fluent in Spanish and French and has working knowledge of Bulgarian and Bosnian/Serbian/Croatian.

As part of her scholarship, Cimaglia did archaeological fieldwork in Catalonia in Spain and took an Outward Bound sailing course along the Maine coast. With a travel award for a junior year abroad, Cimaglia studied classics at King’s College in London. She also won three merit scholarships for work and travel abroad from the classics department.

Her activities since graduating from Carolina include working at archaeological sites in France and studying Bulgarian at the University of Pittsburgh in summer 2007; and studying Turkish in Turkey last summer on a U.S. Department of State scholarship. In 2007-08, Cimaglia conducted research on another Fulbright grant at the Bulgarian Archaeological Institute and Museum.

Cimaglia’s current work involves creating a replicable, transplantable design for sustainable tourism at UNESCO World Heritage Sites – places that UNESCO has identified as important to the cultural and natural heritage of people around the world.

Ultimately, she would like to found and operate an organization that preserves both archaeological sites and the economic needs of communities in which they are located.

“Archaeological sites should be able to create enough revenue to fund their own future conservation and protection,” she said. “I have dedicated my life to protecting sites of cultural patrimony, because to lose our connections to these places would be a loss too great to bear.”

Rachel Alison Harper

Harper, a senior biology major, is president of the UNC chapter of Phi Beta Kappa. She has made the dean’s list every semester.

She is assured of graduating as a public service scholar – a student who has performed at least 300 hours of public service during his or her college career. Harper has almost 400 hours.

She has conducted research for more than two years in a genetics lab at the Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center. She is writing an honors thesis on her work, and she co-authored a paper on the topic that was published last year as part of the proceedings for the Keystone Symposium on Cancer, Genomics and Epigenomics, a research meeting of scientists held in Taos, N.M.

Harper decided to become a doctor on a visit to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. “I realized New Orleans would require dedicated medical personnel long after the immediate cleanup,” she said. “Community doctors are on the front lines every day, working with their patients to ensure that vital public health information is translated into effective, long-term health care. I knew then that my passion needed a life beyond the lab.”

Harper’s public service has included volunteering with a local health clinic run by UNC students, where her work included taking vital statistics, helping to compile demographic information and some translation for Spanish-speaking patients.

“I hope to assist Hispanics and ultimately other underserved populations in my future practice, and to serve as their champion as our country faces radical changes in its medical system,” she said.

In fall 2007, Harper coordinated World AIDS Week at Carolina, which involved 17 campus organizations, more than 100 students and a visit of sections of the World AIDS Quilt to UNC. She wrote grant proposals that brought in $2,650 to support the week’s events.

Through N.C. Hillel, a foundation for Jewish life on campus, Harper has been involved with social justice projects.

She believes that governments and doctors should provide information about public health issues. “As a Luce Scholar, I hope to explore how Asian doctors have blended traditional medical practices with the latest biomedical advances and investigate how Asian governments promote sexual health initiatives and confront public health emergencies.”


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