Students Receive Whitaker Fellowships

Students Receive Whitaker Fellowships
BY DAVID KAPLAN
Rice News Staff
Oct. 22, 1998

Three Rice students from the class of ’98–Brian Harms, Valerie Liu and Alexander
Penn–have won Whitaker Foundation Graduate Fellowships. The Whitaker is a prestigious
biomedical engineering predoctoral grant.

Each fellowship is worth $33,000 per year for a minimum of three years with
an option of another two years, making it potentially a $165,000 scholarship.

Liu says she was extremely excited when she learned that she won the fellowship
and quips, "I guess that drive to the 24-hour post office in downtown Houston
the night the application was due was worth it!"

As Whitaker Graduate Fellowship scholars, Liu and Penn are currently studying
at the University of California-San Diego, and Harms is at MIT.

Says Mark Scheid, assistant vice president for Student Affairs and director
of academic advising and international programs: "The success of Rice students
in the Whitaker competition is another indication that we admit the best and
then give them a great education–in this instance in engineering and science.
We’re very pleased that this excellence has been recognized by the world’s leading
foundation for research in biomedical engineering."

Established in 1975, the Whitaker Foundation is a private, nonprofit foundation
dedicated to improving human health through the support of biomedical engineering.
The foundation has awarded more than $380 million to colleges and universities
for faculty research, graduate fellowships and program development.

Nationally, there were 47 Whitaker fellows accepted this year. Two schools,
the University of California-Berkeley and MIT, had four winners, and, along
with Rice, two other schools had three: Case Western Reserve University and
the University of Michigan.

As is the case with the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship
competition earlier this year, Rice is among the leaders in the number of fellowship
winners produced per capita.

Penn says he is "extremely honored" to be chosen as a Whitaker fellowship
recipient because "the Whitaker Foundation has done so much for the field
all across the country and at every level."

Penn is concentrating on classes his first year and has also begun working
part time in a lab where he is using a fluorescent probe to observe cholesterol
in the membranes of human umbilical vein endothelial cells. His research emphasis
will most likely be in tissue engineering.

Liu is also focused on classes and will begin her lab rotations later this
year. She hasn’t decided whether she’ll go into industry or academia after completing
her fellowship, but is leaning toward industry.

Harms is in MIT’s chemical engineering department, where, he says, about one
third of the faculty do biologically related research. He decided to make the
emerging scientific discipline of tissue engineering his career pursuit after
taking a graduate-level course from Tony Mikos, associate professor of bioengineering
and chemical engineering at Rice.

Harms is currently busy with his core chemical engineering classes and says,
"Sometimes I feel snowed under, but I think Rice prepared me quite well."