March/April 2009
Around the Quads
Students Win Marshall and Gates Cambridge Scholarships
By By Ethan Rouen ’04J
Samuel Fury Childs Daly ’09, a Milwaukee native who has traveled extensively through Europe and Africa, has won a prestigious Marshall Scholarship, which he plans to use to earn two master’s, one in history and one in African studies, from Oxford. The Marshall Scholarship will cover all expenses for two years of study.
Emily Jordan ’09 and Caroline Robertson ’09 have won Gates Cambridge Scholarships to pursue graduate study at the University of Cambridge. The award was founded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in 2000. With 752 candidates vying for just 37 awards this year, the Gates Cambridge is considered on the same level of difficulty as winning the Marshall or Rhodes Scholarship, according to Michael Pippenger, associate dean of fellowship programs and study abroad.
Daly became interested in majoring in African studies following a first-year language fair where, on a whim, he registered for Swahili. He now speaks Swahili, Yoruba, French and Spanish. During his junior year, Daly spent a semester at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and another semester at the University of Dar Es Salaam in Tanzania. He works on campus for the Law School’s Center for Social Justice and in the Oral History Project office.
“Sam is somebody who has tremendous intellectual curiosity and wants to use his knowledge to improve the world that we all live in,” Pippenger says. “He has traveled all over Africa and has a real sense of wanderlust that his study abroad experience certainly helped with.”
Daly said he was in a subway station, returning from tutoring a high school student, when he got the call that he had won. “I couldn’t understand half of what they were saying, but I heard, ‘Congratulations,’ and the rest didn’t really matter,” he says.
Working with the Fellowships Office at Columbia, Daly went through dozens of drafts of his application and countless practice interviews. “It is one of the best environments I’ve come across in my time here,” he said of working with the office.
Jordan and Robertson are the first Columbia seniors since 2002 to be awarded Gates Cambridge Scholarships.
Jordan, who is from Chicago, has double majored in psychology and anthropology. She became fascinated by neuroscience while conducting independent laboratory research. Her honors thesis project shows how social enrichment can impact the brain and behavior of mice so that animals with enriched experiences exhibit more appropriate social behaviors.
At Cambridge, Jordan will continue studying the brain in Professor Trevor Robbins’ lab in the department of experimental psychology. She says her graduate research will focus on how impulsive behavior develops in rats and how impulsivity contributes to addiction and can be transmitted across generations. Jordan plans to become a professor of neuroscience.
Robertson, who also is from Chicago, has majored in neuroscience and religion, with a focus on philosophy and ethics. She has been a research assistant in neuroscience and philosophy departments since she was 17, at the University of Chicago, Columbia and Cambridge. In the fall, she will return to Professor Simon Baron-Cohen’s laboratory and the Autism Research Center at Cambridge to begin a Ph.D. on the neurobiology of autism.
After completing her Ph.D., Robertson plans to pursue a clinical degree and balance research with practice. She became interested in coupling research with clinical work during her second year at Columbia, when she trained to become a rape crisis and domestic abuse counselor. She now serves in this capacity in 10 hospital emergency rooms in Manhattan and Queens.
The Fellowships Office has helped students win three Rhodes Scholarships, three Marshall Scholarships, two Gates Cambridge Scholarships and 18 Fulbright Scholarships in the last three years.
Click here to read about Jisung Park ’09, this year’s Rhodes winner.
To read about other recent scholarship winners, visit www.college.columbia.edu/cct_archive/jan_feb08/quads4.php and www.college.columbia.edu/cct/may_jun08/around_the_quads5.