Semester: 2014-2015

Ritankar Das

Ritankar Das graduated as the University Medalist in 2013, with a double major in Bioengineering and Chemical Biology. Ritankar received an MSc in biomedical engineering is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Chemistry at Cambridge as a Gates Scholar. He plans to perform bio-molecular research to find new energy sources at a national research lab after complete the degree. In addition to winning the 2013 Gates-Cambridge Scholarship and Goldwater Scholarship, Ritankar has received numerous other honors, including the National Science Foundation GCI Award, the American Chemical Society National Meeting Award, and […]

Charlotte Hull : Beinecke Scholarship

After arriving as a transfer student in fall 2013, Charlotte Hull compiled an outstanding record of academic achievement as a double major in history and English at Berkeley. In addition to her excellent academic record, Charlotte’s accomplishments include: a number of scholarly publications, extensive volunteer experience, and an extremely interesting life story. Charlotte plans to pursue a Ph.D. in Colonial History upon the completion of her undergraduate degree.

Zarko Perovic

Zarko Perovic grew up in Serbia and graduated from UC Berkeley, among the top five students in his class. His primary passion, which he developed in his childhood, is preventing war crimes. At the UC Berkeley War Crimes Studies Center, Zarko helped create the Virtual Tribunala project that synthesized the court proceedings of the Cambodia Tribunal for the benefit of victims of the Cambodian Genocide. After graduating, he worked at the Office of Global Criminal Justice at the U.S. State Department as a John Gardner Fellow, where he helped with […]

Sarah Mohamed

Sarah Mohamed graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from the University of California, Berkeley in May 2014. She studied Political Science and Comparative Literature, with particular focus on transitional justice and post- colonial literature. Sarah was a Public Policy and International Affairs Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University in 2013 and is currently the Program Coordinator and Research Assistant for the Human Rights Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. She plans to pursue the […]

Shengkai (Alwin) Mao

Alwin is majoring in Astrophysics and will be a senior in fall 2015. He hopes to attain a Ph.D. in Astrophysics and perform research and teach at the university level. He has made the Dean’s Honors list twice. Alwin has been a research assistant with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, studying tidal disruption in dwarf spheroidal galaxies around the Milky Way, and with North Carolina State University, where he adapted VH-1 to simulate and evolve models of 1.4 solar mass Type la Supernovae and developed a code to determine a […]

Nicole Schauser

Nicole Schauser is an incoming senior studying Materials Science Engineering. She plans to pursue a Ph.D. in this field with a research focus on materials for renewable energy technologies. Her career goal is to perform industry-based research on photovoltaics or energy storage devices to help mitigate climate change. She has been involved in two research groups at UC Berkeley, studying 3D laser scanning techniques and also dendrite grown in lithium solid polymer electrolyte batteries. Nicole was a Summer Intern for Next Energy Technologies, where she researched efficient methods for depositing […]

Margaret Comer

Margaret graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 2012 with a B.A. in Anthropology. Shethen went on to study for an MPhil at Cambridge and has been recently awarded the Gates Cambridge Scholarship, to pursue a Ph.D. In her own words, “As a child of archaeologists, I was surrounded by material culture and immaterial pasts, but I was also fascinated by politics from an early age. While studying abroad in Moscow and Copenhagen, I became intrigued by uses (and abuses) of the material past in the service of nationalism, which led to […]

Ariana Pemberton : Critical Language Scholarship

In May 2017 Ariana will graduate with a major in Art History and South Asian Studies. She has a deepinterest in the Western Himalayan region from the ancient period. As a CLS participant she will study Hindi in Jaipur, India. After the CLS program, I Ariana plans to stay in Jaipur for an additional semester and continue school through the host university AIIS. She hopes to become fluent in Hindi, and eventually move on to learning Sanskrit in graduate school.