Wake Forest Magazine, March 2007 - Past Issues - Wake Forest ...

Meet the RhodesWake Forest’s ten modern-era Rhodes Scholarship recipientsbesides the latest, Michelle Sikes—their majors at Wake Forestand what they have done since Oxford.JOHN DAVISR I C H A R D C H A P M A N ( ’ 8 6 )Mathematics major. He completed master’s and doctoraldegrees in computer science at Cornell University and hasbeen an associate professor and the director of the Centerfor Innovations in Mobile, Pervasive, Agile ComputingTechnologies in the Department of Computer Science andSoftware Engineering at Auburn University since 1993.M A R I A M E R R I T T ( ’ 8 7 )Biology major. Earned a doctoral degree in philosophy atthe University of California at Berkeley and is now a facultymember in the Department of International Health at theJohns Hopkins School of Public Health.S C O T T P R E T O R I U S ( ’ 8 9 )Chemistry major. After receiving a medical degree fromJohns Hopkins University, he served on the medical facultyand as a section chief at the University of Pennsylvania andis now in private medical practice.R O B E R T E S T H E R ( ’ 9 1 )History major. After Oxford, he earned a master’s degreein health policy from the University of London and adegree in medicine from Vanderbilt University. He did aninternship and residency at the University of North CarolinaMedical Center and a fellowship in muscoloskeletal oncologyat the Mayo Clinic and is now back in Chapel Hill as amember of the faculty of UNC School of Medicine.C A R O L Y N F R A N T Z ( ’ 9 4 )Philosophy major. She earned a law degree from theUniversity of Michigan and is now practicing law inChicago.C H A R L O T T E O PA L ( ’ 9 7 )Economics major. She serves as director of ProductDevelopment at TransFair USA, the only third-party FairTrade certification agency in the U.S. (Fair Trade is a consumerlabel that guarantees fair prices for coffee, tea, cocoa,fruit, rice, sugar, and vanilla for producers in developingcountries.) She co-authored the world’s first textbook onFair Trade, which is being translated into Japanese, andlives in Switzerland.J E N N I F E R B U M G A R N E R ( ’ 9 9 )Political science major. At Wake Forest, she traveled toEastern Europe to study the Roma people—also knownas gypsies—and was a volunteer for the Red Cross inthe Transcarpathia region of Ukraine, teaching Englishclasses and helping set up a local crisis hotline for women.Formerly the executive director of the N.C. Alliance forEconomic Justice, she now is a policy adviser to NorthCarolina Governor Michael Easley.J E N N I F E R H A R R I S ( ’ 0 4 )Political science major. At Wake Forest, she traveledextensively in Europe and elsewhere, researching refugeeissues and serving refugees in Latvia, Croatia, and Sarajevo.She now is in her first year of law school at Yale University.R E B E C C A C O O K ( ’ 0 5 )Biology major. Born and raised in Kijabe, Kenya, whereher parents are missionaries, she was co-founder of theWake Forest Student Global AIDS Campaign, spendingtime in Kenya conducting research on ways of teachingnew mothers practices that could help reduce infantmortality and volunteering at the hospital where she wasborn. She is in her second year at Oxford (read her firstpersonreflections on page 18). She plans to return to Africaas a primary care physician after completing medical schooland training.L A K S H M I K R I S H N A N ( ’ 0 6 )English and German major. Born in India, she has livedin England and the United States. At Wake Forest, shewrote her senior honors thesis on vampires and bloodcontagion in nineteenth-century novels, relating them tomodern anxieties about AIDS and other blood-transmitteddiseases. As president of Wake Forest’s chapter of AmnestyInternational, she focused on global AIDS and the politicaland ethical issues attendant to it. She also edited thePhilomathesian literary journal. She is in her first year atOxford (read her first-person reflections on page 19). Afterher Rhodes studies, she plans to attend medical school anddevote her career to international health issues.MARCH 2007 17