Two UConn Students Win Udall Scholarships

April 15, 2011

Ethan Butler and Katherine Tsantiris — (left) Ethan Butler ’12 (ENG) (Photo: Christopher LaRosa); (right) Katherine Tsantiris ’12 (CANR) (Photo: Alan Huck)

By Nan Cooper and Karen A. Grava

Two UConn juniors with a passion for the environment have been selected to receive a Udall Foundation Scholarship. Ethan Butler, a chemical engineering major in the School of Engineering, and Katherine Tsantiris, an environmental science major in the College of Liberal Arts Sciences, are among 80 students nationwide to win the highly competitive scholarship.

Established by Congress in 1992, the Morris K. Udall and Stewart L. Udall Foundation celebrates the 30-year legacy of the Udall brothers, both of whom represented Arizona in the House of Representatives and championed environmental reform. The Udall scholarships, which carry an award of $5,000, are open to U.S. college students who intend to pursue careers in environmental subjects, Native American health care, or tribal public policy. (more…)

Shining a Light on his Heritage

April 13, 2011

By Lauren Lalancette

For most students, completing forms, such as the financial aid application for college, is a daunting task. But Jeremy Bui ’13 (BUS) coped with a mountain of paperwork before he even completed high school, when he and his two brothers established an educational foundation to benefit children in Vietnam.

Together with his twin Zachary ’13 (ENG) and older brother Timothy ’10 (CLAS), Jeremy established the Viet-Sun Foundation Inc., a nonprofit organization whose mission is to provide educational opportunities through academic scholarships and other resources to impoverished village children in Vietnam, where his parents lived until they immigrated to the United States. (more…)

UConn Students Win Goldwaters, Truman Scholarship

April 4, 2011

David Lindsay, Kathleen Carey, Colin Carlson; and Anna Green — Goldwater Scholarship winners (left) David Lindsay ’12, Kathleen Carey ’12, and Colin Carlson ’12, all juniors, and sophomore Anna Green ’13, who received an honorable mention.

By Christine Buckley and Sheila Foran

Four UConn students have been honored by two prestigious scholarship organizations: the Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship Program and the Harry S. Truman Scholarship Foundation.

Juniors Colin Carlson and W. David Lindsay in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and Kathleen Carey in the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources, also a junior, have been awarded Goldwater scholarships, which are given for academic merit in the sciences, engineering, mathematics, and computer science. Anna Green, a sophomore, received an honorable mention for the award. The scholarship grants $7,500 toward the completion of the recipient’s undergraduate degree. (more…)

Nursing School Honors Dr. Jack Rowe

October 25, 2010

By Martha Miller and Jenni Saunders (CLAS ’11)

The School of Nursing has named Dr. John “Jack” W. Rowe as the recipient of its Josephine A. Dolan Award for Distinguished Service. Rowe, who is immediate past chairman of UConn’s Board of Trustees, was honored at the school’s annual Reflections of Excellence awards ceremony on Oct. 23.

The Dolan Award, named for the school’s first faculty member, is the nursing school’s highest recognition for distinguished service. (more…)

Rowe Researcher: Fibroblast Growth Factor 2

August 9, 2010

John Zyzo conducting research in the lab

Summer 2010: Fibroblast Growth Factor 2 Regulations of Microvascular Pericytes Differentiation into Osteoblast and Adipocyte

By John Zyzo and Ruth Washington, Ph.D., in collaboration with Marja Hurley, M.D.

Fibroblast Growth Factor 2 has been known to play a role in osteogenesis and adipogenesis of pericyte cells. Although vascular pericytes

can differentiate into osteoblast and adipocyte, the involvement of signaling pathways and molecular mechanisms were the main focus of our experiments. (more…)

Rowe Researcher: Oral Health in Honduras

Patrick Cooper travels to Honduras to help with dental work.

Summer 2010: Oral Health in Honduras: Comparing the Decayed, Missing, and Filled Teeth (DMF) Score to the Age, BMI, and Gender of the Honduran People

By Patrick Cooper and Merrill Singer, Ph.D.

I used my Rowe Research Award to conduct research in Honduras while on a medical missionary trip. I interviewed 600 participants to collect data comparing their oral health to their diet as well as to their geographic region, age, and gender.

Read Pat’s thesis.

Getting Students Interested in Science

July 18, 2010

Students in the UConn Summer Program

By M.A.C. Lynch

Thanks to an academic summer camp she attended while in high school, Gian Grant will be starting her freshman year at UConn this fall on an educational track that she hopes will take her all the way through medical school. What really made an impression on Grant, she says, was a 2009 summer field trip to the UConn Health Center, where a hematologist talked about her research. Grant decided then and there that pediatric hematology was her calling. (more…)

Former Scholarship Student Now a Scholarship Donor

May 3, 2010

By Jane Gordon

Jack Rowe M.D. has had many titles in his life: professor at Harvard and Columbia, CEO and chairman of Aetna, CEO of Mount Sinai Medical Center and School of Medicine in New York City, chair of the Board of Trustees at the University of Connecticut, and one last title that actually came first: scholarship student.

“I only had the benefit of higher education because I had full academic scholarships to college,” he says. “My family otherwise would not have been able to send me to school.” (more…)

2010 Distinguished Alumni Award: Virginia DeJohn Anderson

April 28, 2010

Virginia DeJohn Anderson is a professor of early American history at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where she has taught since 1985. Her area of specialization is the history of Colonial and Revolutionary America. Her latest book, Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America, received the Phi Alpha Theta Best Subsequent Book Award in 2005. Creatures of Empire combines ethnohistorical and environmental history approaches to examine the impact of imported livestock on Anglo-Indian relations in the North American colonies. (more…)

2010 Distinguished Alumni Award Recipient: Roger Ballentine

Roger Ballentine is the President of Green Strategies Inc., where he assists clients in the energy and environmental arena with domestic and international public policy matters, investment guidance in the “clean tech” marketplace, marketing and business development strategies, sustainability, and capital formation. He is also a Venture Partner with Arborview Capital LLC, a private equity firm focused on the clean technology marketplace, as well as Lecturer on Law at the Harvard Law School teaching in the area of energy and climate policy and a Senior Fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute in Washington D.C. (more…)