Meet UConn’s 2017 Rhodes and Marshall Scholarship Nominees.
Tasneem Ahmed (CLAS ’17) is a senior majoring in Economics and Human Rights. She is interested in the intersection of human rights, economic development and international affairs with a particular focus on labor rights of workers worldwide. She is a UNESCO Student Ambassador for Human Rights and is the treasurer of both UConn’s International Relations Association and TedxUConn. In 2014 and 2015, she helped coordinate a TedxUConn event focused on Health and Humanity. She is also currently conducting research on the Effects of the Business Cycle on Human Trafficking with the help of Professor Nishith Prakash of the Economics Department. In summer 2014, Tasneem interned with the Permanent Mission of Bangladesh for the United Nations. Her experience consisted of attending numerous UN Security Council and Economic and Social Council meetings and writing reports to send back to Dhaka, Bangladesh. Here, she had the opportunity to work extensively with the Millennium Development Goals and Sustainable Development Goals from the perspective of a third world country. Realizing the power that multinational corporations now have in the international arena, Tasneem thinks one of the most effective ways to tackle human rights issues is for businesses to become aware of their corporate social responsibility. For this reason, Tasneem hopes to focus her future career around corporate social responsibility and sustainability issues.
John Bear (CLAS, ’17) is a double honors major in Molecular and Cell Biology (MCB) and Physiology and Neurobiology (PNB) who is also minoring in Mathematics. A Babbidge Scholar, LSAMP Scholar, and McNair Scholar, John was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in 2015. In January 2016, John participated in an inter-session education abroad opportunity in three communities in Ecuador, where he performed volunteer community outreach with Social Entrepreneur Corps during the day and spent his evenings hiking the surrounding hills. His passion for exploring other cultures and their education systems next took him to Spain, where he hiked the Camino de Santiago in August and September before returning to UConn to complete his degree. He will be returning to South America in summer 2017 to work with Social Entrepreneur Corps in Guatemala. A published researcher with experience in several labs on campus, John’s current research under the mentorship of PNB Professor Angel de Blas centers around understanding the structure and function of GABAergic postsynapses in the central nervous system, and mapping the mathematical principles governing circuit function. For his efforts, he received Honorable Mention in the 2017 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship competition. John’s ultimate goal is to earn a PhD in neurobiology and teach at a university while continuing to volunteer in public service.
Owen Hart (CLAS, ’17) is a senior Honors student and Babbidge Scholar from Southbury CT, majoring in Molecular and Cell Biology. Owen completed a minor in French through UConn’s education abroad programs in Paris and Toulouse. During his sophomore year, Owen began working as an undergraduate research assistant in Dr. Challa Kumar’s Chemistry Lab. During his sophomore and junior year, Owen served as Program Director of the Collegiate Health Service Corps (CHSC), a Community Outreach organization dedicated to bringing health education to medically underserved communities. As Program Director, Owen was responsible for ensuring the health education goals of all participants were logistically possible. Owen recently completed his Honors thesis, which examined the implications of antibiotic resistance on the sexual health of gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men. Owen aspires to work in the field of public health, a field that will require he draw from both his bioscience and social science backgrounds. Owen has come to fully appreciate that biological, social, economic, and political forces must all be considered as we work to address health disparities and improve public health.
John Michael Ovian (CLAS ’17) from Madison, CT, is an honors student pursuing dual B.S./M.S. degrees in chemistry. John plans on earning a Ph.D. in chemistry upon graduation. Working in the laboratory of Dr. Nicholas Leadbeater in the Department of Chemistry, his research has focused generally on organic methodology development, with the overarching goal of making organic synthesis a more environmentally friendly field. To this end, he works with an oxoammonium salt oxidant (known as Bobbitt’s Salt), which is safe, environmentally benign, and recyclable. As a Holster Scholar he spent the summer after his freshman year probing the mechanism of oxoammonium salt oxidations and developing a method to cleave allyl ethers to their corresponding carbonyl species. These projects were published in the peer-reviewed journals, The Journal of Organic Chemistry and Organic and Biomolecular Chemistry, respectively. Additionally, he has developed a method for the direct oxidative conversion of aldehydes to nitriles, which was published in the leading chemistry journal Angewandte Chemie International Edition, and also a method for oxidative ring opening of cyclic ethers, will be submitted for review soon. He has been awarded several Office of Undergraduate Research grants and presented numerous poster and oral presentations. This past summer, John worked in the laboratory of Dr. Neil Garg at UCLA as a part of the prestigious Amgen Scholars Program. Recently, John was selected as a University Scholar, where his project involves merging photocatalysis with oxoammonium salt chemistry. He also possesses a passion for teaching and mentoring his peers and is a teaching assistant for both the honors organic and general chemistry sequences, as well as a Peer Research Ambassador and Peer Allies Through Honors mentor. John enjoys singing as the music director of Extreme Measures, one of UConn’s premier co-ed a cappella groups.