Meet Northeastern’s 2020 Marshall, Mitchell, and Rhodes Scholarship Nominees
The Rhodes, Marshall, and Mitchell Scholarships—which fund study in the United Kingdom and Ireland—are among the most prestigious postgraduate awards in the world. This year Northeastern University is proud to have nominated an outstanding slate of applicants for these extraordinary opportunities. These students and recent alumni, who have been selected to represent Northeastern at highest level nationally and internationally, embody the best of our global, experiential research university: academic excellence, consequential research and creative endeavor, dedicated service to others, and an aspiration to apply their prodigious talents and skills to improving our world. Read on to meet these exceptional young people.
Rose Ajegwu COE’21, Industrial Engineering
Nominations: Marshall Scholarship
Rose is an experimental artist who uses a variety of media—photography, digital design, film, painting, poetry—to trace, challenge, and provocatively rearrange dominant ideas of gender, race, and sexuality in the context of both African-American and African diasporic cultures. Raised in Prince George’s County, Maryland, but schooled in Asaba, Delta State, Nigeria, from 6th to 10th grade, Rose grew up “between places and cultures,” learning to examine cultural tropes and ideas with an insider’s knowledge and an outsider’s questions at the same time. While excelling as an engineering student, Rose has adapted the knack for creating and organizing that underpins an engineering skillset into the serious work of self-actualization and community organizing through art. With the support of the PEAK Experiences Awards, Rose completed “we are more than bodies,” a collection of digital collages interpreting the stories of so-called “third culture kids”—children of immigrants who grew up in a place different from where their parents grew up—who identify as Queer, with a specific focus on Nigerian Americans. Rose co-developed an eight-week photography workshop, Roots Through Photos, for a teen center in Roxbury, which progressed from the basics of camera operation to the emotional risk-taking of valuing one’s own art. Rose also played a major part in the development of Northeastern’s new minor in Black Feminist Studies.
Kerry Eller COE’21, Bioengineering, minor in Political Science
Nominations: Marshall Scholarship, Rhodes Scholarship
Kerry Eller’s dedication to ensuring that those in low-income countries have access not simply to the medical technologies that save and enhance life, but also to the apparatus of development itself, was recognized with a 2020 Truman Scholarship. Kerry spent high-school summers developing a cell line that could be used to heal tears in the menisci. After her first year at Northeastern, she worked at Brown University developing novel assay techniques that led to an eightfold increase in her lab’s capacity to image fish larvae in search of chemicals that could repair vision impairments currently affecting 253 million people. She next embarked on a project characterizing musculoskeletal effects of obesity, another rapidly increasing threat to human health. Most recently, Kerry completed a global co-op at the Center for Technology for Research and Development with Social Impact at Chile’s Universidad del Desarrollo. There, she worked to improve both the mechanical function and the diagnostic accuracy of a remote mosquito trap. Kerry’s passion for research with social impact is also a distinguishing feature of her extensive extracurricular involvement in organizations dedicated to global health. Kerry aims to complete a PhD in bioengineering and to pursue a career working with communities around the world to develop culturally appropriate technologies that expand access to healthcare.
Shellaina Gordon COS’21, Biochemistry, minor in Ethics
Nominations: Marshall Scholarship, Rhodes Scholarship
Shellaina Gordon chose to major in biochemistry at Northeastern because the program blends biology and chemistry in way that encourages mastery of the separate disciplines while also providing a clear understanding of their interplay. Drawing on knowledge from both domains, Shellaina says that she has learned to apply her skills to diverse challenges and answer complex questions in a variety of research settings. Shellaina’s research achievements, which have led to three peer-reviewed publications, were recognized with the 2020 Goldwater Scholarship. These included investigating the role of transition metals, particularly manganese, in cell development at the University of Massachusetts Medical School; analyzing how oxidative stress-relieving compounds contribute to antibiotic resistance in A. buamannii at Northeastern; and proving and implementing the use of a human naive library for use as a selection tool in discovering high-affinity antibodies while on co-op at Visterra, a clinical-stage biotech company. Shellaina intends to earn the MD/PhD in order to bring basic research into a translational setting, with a focus on proteomics and a commitment to increasing equity both in the medico-scientific professions and in clinical research and care.
Morgan Hines COS/CSSH’19, Biology and English
Nominations: Marshall Scholarship
At Northeastern, Morgan Hines spanned traditional disciplinary boundaries to interrogate the injustices of the past, investigate the inequities of the present, and intervene in the institutions of the future. Moving outward from her rigorous biology curriculum, Morgan completed a first lab-based co-op at Harvard Medical School, after which she began her long involvement in the study of infants’ neurological and physiological development, particularly the influence of environmental and social determinants on the ability to ingest food and vocalize, within Northeastern’s Speech and Neurodevelopment Lab. At the same time, Morgan rose through the leadership of End Neglected Diseases, a student group that advocates for scientific and policy initiatives to eradicate the seven most common neglected tropical diseases—a group of largely curable diseases that garner little attention and funding because they affect the world’s most forgotten. Morgan also knows that the injustices that shape today’s health disparities have their roots in centuries of inequity. This is why Morgan, future physician, listens to the stories of the past. For four years, Morgan has researched descriptions of adverse health events in 18th and 19th-century autobiographies of enslaved persons in the United States, using her enormous literary sensitivity as well as her skill in computer-aided textual analysis to trace lineages of physical and psychological trauma across these archives. A researcher and a storyteller, an anatomist and an archivist, a scientist and a humanist—Morgan hopes to study physician-patient communication both historically and contemporarily as preparation for a career as a physician and advocate.
Nathan Hostert CSSH’21, Political Science, minor in Law and Public Policy
Nominations: Marshall Scholarship, Rhodes Scholarship
Nathan Hostert is dedicated to turning the places where we live (by circumstance or choice) into the communities where we thrive. Having grown up in the midst of the “Kansas experiment,” where record-breaking Republican tax cuts significantly reduced the state’s provisioning of public goods, Hostert has spent his time at Northeastern exploring the ways that government can be used to shape more just, equitable, and inclusive communities. An academic superstar in political science, Hostert has taken his learning from the page to the public stage through a variety of service roles. Within the university, Nathan advanced through the ranks of student government as a powerful voice for inclusion and well-being, ultimately having his slate elected as the first openly gay president and vice president of the Student Government Association. His work across constituencies on campus has expanded gender-neutral housing options, increased access to mental health services, and connected students to public transit. At a co-op within the Financial Litigation Unit of the US Attorney’s Office in Boston, Nathan strove to ensure that individuals and communities victimized by white-collar crime were made whole, drafting motions that resulted in millions of dollars of ill-gotten gains being recouped. Later, at the Boston Planning and Development Agency, Nathan led public meetings to engage the community in planning for the largest development project in Boston’s history. Nathan hopes to study political administration at the graduate level with the ultimate goal of returning to Wichita and making Kansas a thriving and welcoming home for everyone.
Heather MacEwen Bouvé’20, Health Science, minor in Global Health
Nominations: Mitchell Scholarship
Heather’s interests lie at the intersection of surgery and public health. While we might think of surgery as a highly individualized experience—something conducted on one patient at a time—access to safe surgery is a major public health issue. More than five billion people globally are estimated to lack access to safe, affordable surgery. Moreover, the standardization and routinization of surgical practice and procedure incurs significant public health benefits through improved outcomes and reduced mistakes. In preparation for her career, Heather has volunteered across departments from Women’s and Newborn Services to the Neurosciences Clinic at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, conducted research with the department of anesthesiology at Boston Children’s Hospital, and worked in patient care in the Hyperbaric Oxygen Unit and the Surgical Oncology Adult Unit at Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary. Heather’s long-term investment in community-based public health initiatives is evident in her work with Boston Healthcare for the Homeless and Peer Health Exchange. Heather aspires to earn a public health degree before continuing to medical school and training as an orthopedic surgeon—a specialty in which only five percent of American practitioners are women.
Arunika Makam COE’21, Mechanical Engineering, MS in Mechatronics
Nominations: Marshall Scholarship, Rhodes Scholarship
Arunika is a highly accomplished mechanical engineer who, through her leadership of community-focused health initiatives, has come to see that engineered solutions—devices, drugs, vaccines—are only one component of the type of systemic interventions that are most effective in creating better health outcomes. When she was 12, Arunika’s family relocated from Massachusetts to India, her parents’ home country, giving her a comfort with moving between cultures that enabled several subsequent global experiences. Arunika has worked in the RESIST (Respiratory Innovation and Simulation Team) Lab of Professor Jessica Oakes, which combines state-of-the-art experimental and numerical methods to quantify the health impacts of inhaled toxins—such as those from electronic cigarettes—as well as to optimize inhaled therapeutics. On co-op at two medical device manufacturers, Seventh Sense Biosystems in Massachusetts and Styker in Germany—Arunika delved into the complex interplay of design, manufacturing, research, quality, and regulatory considerations. Arunika serves as co-president of the Northeastern University chapter of Peer Health Exchange, which provides health education to over 800 students at ten area public schools. In this extraordinary year, Arunika has led the effort to transition PHE volunteer training and program delivery to an online format.
Isabella Ragazzi CSSH’21, International Affairs and Economics
Nominations: Marshall Scholarship, Rhodes Scholarship
Isabella has used the toolkits of her combined majors, international affairs and economics, as well as her extensive global experiences, to gained complementary analytic and quantitative frameworks for understanding how we arrived at our moment of social and environmental crisis—and how we can build new structures and systems to guide us toward a more just and sustainable future. In addition to her coursework, Isabella has completed advanced independent research on sustainable practices in the agricultural sector, particularly the coffee industry, which was also the focus of an Alternative Spring Break to Costa Rica that she led. Isabella’s three co-ops demonstrate her ability to innovate across disciplinary (as well as geographic) boundaries, first at a digital ecotourism startup in Spain, then as a researcher at the Institute for Economics and Peace, an Australian think tank, and finally as an analyst at the grid-scale battery pioneer Form Energy. At Form Energy, Isabella used her analytic, research, and quantitative skills to co-author a white paper that conclusively establishes that grid-scale storage of renewable energy can be cost-effective and feasible as well as an essential component of environmental justice efforts.