Aguilar wins Watson Fellowship, Wang awarded Zeff Fellowship

Baker College senior Lucrecia Aguilar has been awarded a 2018 Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, which provides $30,000 for a year of international travel for a research project after she graduates from Rice, and Will Rice College senior Courtney Wang received Rice’s Roy and Hazel Zeff Memorial Fellowship, which also supports a year of world travel and independent study.

Baker College senior Lucrecia Aguilar has been awarded a 2018 Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, which provides $30,000 for a year of international travel for a research project after she graduates from Rice.

Aguilar was among 41 Watson Fellows chosen from more than 150 candidates hailing from eight countries and 17 states who were nominated at select U.S. private liberal arts colleges and universities. The Zeff Fellowship is given to the Rice student who is ranked highest by the University Committee on Fellowships and Awards but did not receive a Watson Fellowship.

Aguilar intends to visit five countries during her Watson year, where she’ll study big cat species and their increasingly vulnerable existence.

“Because big cat species are severely threatened due to human activities such as habitat destruction or poaching, understanding how humans threaten big cats, how big cats impact local communities and how conservationists strive to save these species will be vital to creating sustainable human-cat coexistence,” Aguilar said. “Humans also rely on big cats in many ecological, economic and cultural ways, so I want to explore how losing cats would affect people.”

After winning a Wagoner Foreign Study Scholarship in 2016, Aguilar spent the summer of 2017 working with jaguars in Belize. The ecology and evolutionary biology major said the trip prepared her for both living abroad and studying big cats in remote locations. But her passion for big cats — a group that includes tigers, lions, jaguars and leopards — was born at an early age.

“I’ve loved big cats since first watching ‘The Lion King’ as a toddler,” Aguilar said. “As I learned more and more about the risk of losing these species to extinction, I knew I wanted to work in wildlife conservation and help protect these magnificent, important creatures. My academic experiences at Rice, particularly study abroad and my professors in the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology program, helped cement this life path for me.”

Aguilar will visit Botswana, Indonesia, the United Kingdom, Brazil and India, spending two to three months in each location. “In each country I chose, there are specific conservation problems and innovations that I want to explore to get a sense of the variety of ways in which human-cat coexistence is being facilitated,” Aguilar said. “For example, I hope to work with a grassroots organization for part of my India stay that encourages locals to benefit from snow leopards through cat-specific ecotourism initiatives.”

But what about England, where there are no native big cat species? “I chose this country because there are many interesting carnivore conservation groups based there,” Aguilar explained, “and I wish to explore the conservation of one small cat species that lives there, the Scottish wildcat.”

After her Watson year, Aguilar will pursue her Ph.D. in big cat conservation work and plans to spend her career working to save these species from extinction.

Will Rice College senior Courtney Wang received Rice’s Roy and Hazel Zeff Memorial Fellowship, which also supports a year of world travel and independent study.

Wang is majoring in psychology and sociology with a minor in poverty, justice, and human capabilities. The Zeff Fellowship will enable her to travel to Taiwan, Malaysia, Jordan, Sweden and Brazil to study multiracialism and how various societies conceptualize race.

“As someone who is half Chinese and half Egyptian, I want to learn about how multiracial individuals navigate their identities across different country contexts,” Wang said. “In learning how multiracial individuals conceptualize their identities and balance their multiple cultures, it will help me to better understand how I can do this with my own identity.” During her travels to Asia and the Middle East, Wang also will seek to “gain an understanding of my multiracial identity from those who share my ethnic backgrounds.”

Wang plans to meet with cultural and religious groups, academic organizations and immigrant populations in each country she visits to understand how multiracialism is treated at a societal level. “Through these [meetings], I will build relationships with minority group members and learn about their experiences with multiculturalism,” Wang said. “Learning about multiracialism on a structural level is important because it provides the social framework in which multiracial people exist in different countries.”

Wang previously spent a semester abroad in South Africa, where she studied multiculturalism and human rights with respect to apartheid and its lasting effects on the country’s population.

“Choosing to study abroad was easily one of the best decisions I’ve made at Rice,” Wang said. “After my semester in South Africa, I knew I wanted to take advantage of as many abroad opportunities as I could.”

After graduation, Wang plans to attend law school and pursue a career in human rights advocacy.

The Watson Foundation was established in 1961 as a charitable trust by Jeannette Watson in honor of her late husband, Thomas J. Watson, the founder of IBM. Their children created the Watson Fellowship in 1968 in recognition of their parents’ long-standing interest in education and world affairs.

Stephen Zeff, the Keith Anderson Professorship in Business and professor of accounting, created the Zeff Fellowship at Rice in honor of his parents, Roy and Hazel Zeff. When the fellowship was first awarded in 2002, Stephen Zeff told Rice News, “There are so many meritorious proposals that are submitted each year [for the Watson]. This scholarship gives another Rice student the opportunity, so it’s as if Rice has an additional student who received the Watson.”