Adeetee Bhide, a senior majoring in biology in Arts & Sciences, has been awarded a prestigious Churchill Scholarship.
She is just the second WUSTL student to have ever won a Churchill. The first was Ben Abella in 1992.
The Churchill Scholarship is one of the most prestigious and academically competitive opportunities of its kind. Each year, only 14 Churchill Scholars are selected from among 103 American colleges and universities.
Churchill Scholars must demonstrate extraordinary talent, outstanding academic achievement and exceptional personal qualities.
The Churchill Scholarship covers tuition and all fees for graduate study at Churchill College at the University of Cambridge ⎯ approximately $25,500-$28,000 a year, depending on the course of study ⎯ as well as a living and travel allowance from $16,500-$20,000.
“I applied for the scholarship without any expectations of receiving it because I know how prestigious it is,” says Bhide, who was awarded a Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship in May 2010.
“I cannot even begin to express how honored I feel to have received it and how excited I am for next year,” she says.
Adeetee was presented a congratulatory gift of the book Michelangelo: The Artist, the Man and his Times by William Wallace, PhD, the Barbara Murphy Bryant Distinguished Professor of Art History & Archaeology in Arts & Sciences, from Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton.
Since 1963, there have been 452 Churchill Scholars in the biological and physics sciences, engineering and mathematics. They include scholars, researchers and teachers in major universities and laboratories, as well as leading figures in finance and industry.
Through the pre-freshman Summer Scholars Program in Biology and Biomedical Research, Bhide studied hearing loss in the lab of Jianxin Bao, PhD, research associate professor of otolaryngology.
In her sophomore year, in the lab of Joel S. Perlmutter, PhD, professor of neurology, Bhide sought subtleties affecting diagnoses of and treatments for Parkinson’s disease.
As a junior, Bhide joined the neuroimaging lab of Bradley Schlaggar, PhD, the A. Ernest & Jane G. Stein Associate Professor of Neurology. In his lab, Bhide worked on her honors thesis, “The Effect of Orthographic Neighborhood Size on the Extent of Priming.”
She spent last semester as a teaching assistant in the laboratory of neurophysiology taught by Erik Herzog, PhD, associate professor of biology in Arts & Sciences.