A four-year scholarship!

We offer up to $20,000 (up to $5000 per year for four years)

The scholarship is open to:

  • exceptionally innovative and creative high school juniors & seniors, & college freshmen
  • a student planning to attend or attending an educational institution in Connecticut or the New York City metropolitan area OR
  • a Connecticut or New York City metropolitan area resident planning to attend or attending an institution of higher education either anywhere in the United States

Do You Think Outside The Box?

Apply for this scholarship if you are . . .

  • a student who has solved artistic, scientific, or technical problems in new or unusual ways
  • a student who has come up with a distinctive solution to problems
    faced by your school, community or family
  • a student who has created a new group, organization, or institution that serves an important

 

2011 WINNERS

These past winners were all students who showed unusual initiative and creativity in solving problems. The scholarship program welcomes applicants who demonstrate creativity in any field.

Sivan Battat, Woodbridge, CT  (Amity High School, Woodbridge, CT/ ACES-ECA, New Haven, CT)  Having grown up in a Jewish community that made her aware of the concept of genocide and the phrase “never again” at an early age, Sivan Battat found herself growing increasingly disturbed at her peers’ lack of awareness of the ongoing crisis in Darfur, Sudan.   After consulting a local Holocaust survivor and a Darfur survivor, Sivan wrote and produced an original play entitled Forever Running as a vehicle for increasing young people’s awareness of genocide. The play melded   perspectives rooted in the Holocaust with perspectives drawn from contemporary violence in Darfur  to dramatize the pain and suffering of the victims of genocide. It has been performed for over 1000 students. Sivan plans to major in theatre at Wesleyan University, where a continuing area of interest will be the potential of theatre to help ignite social change. 


Emily Briere, Mansfield, CT (E. O. Smith High School, Storrs, CT)  Emily Briere recognized that her school had a communication problem: phone trees were inefficient and ineffective and announcements on the PA system tended to be ignored; students often learned too late about cancelled  soccer games or changed homework assignments; and the only way  students could let parents know that they needed to be picked up  after returning from a field trip was for each student to call a parent on his or her cell phone. But social media that students used to communicate with one another were off limits for school officials due to privacy concerns and teachers’ reluctance to “friend” scores of students. Emily worked with students, teachers, parents, counselors and software engineers to develop a web-based communications infrastructure that allows students, teachers and parents in her school to be better-informed and more connected to others who share common interests.  Her innovative problem-solving did more than cut much of the frustration created by miscommunication: it saved the school thousands of dollars previously spent on paper and postage.  She hopes to spread the technology to other high schools in the state. Next year she will study engineering at Pratt School of Engineering, Duke University.


Anca Dogariou, Woodside, NY (Stuyvesant High School, NY) Anca Dogariou understood the importance of visual span tests to diagnose reading problems such as dyslexia, but was troubled by the fact that existing tests that worked well for adults were problematical in evaluating reading problems in young children. Anca devised an innovative test for visual span, and tested it on young children and adults, with good results.  The self-paced test she created and tested, which runs on Microsoft Powerpoint, an application which is readily available, has great potential as a screening tool for dyslexia and other reading problems in children. Next year she will study psychology and pre-medical studies at the State University of New York, Binghamton. 

 
Jenny Liu, Orange, CT (Amity Regional High School, Woodbridge, CT)  In a world in which robots are becoming an increasingly integral part of  everyday life, creating robots that can learn new tasks from natural human instruction is a key challenge. Conventional studies of machine-learning focus on technology that can help robots better interpret information given by human users (such as improved voice recognition, etc.) Jenny Liu’s research took a different approach. Recognizing that this learning process for robots is often limited by the time and attention that people are willing to invest in teaching a robot, Jenny Liu decided to learn more about what qualities in a robot prompt human beings to spend the extra time needed to teach it new tasks. Her research demonstrated that robots that expressed consistent and coherent emotions were able to elicit more and better feedback from human users. Her discovery that endowing robots with believable emotional responses can add significantly to the time and energy their human teachers are willing to give them has important implications for the field of social robotics. Next year she plans to study computer science and sociology at Harvard University.  


Omar Sobh, Shelton, CT (Shelton High School).  Omar Sobh was intrigued by the medical  mystery of why astronauts returning from space trips are more vulnerable to infection, particularly given the possibility  that NASA or other organizations might eventually schedule long-term commercial trips to outer space. Would the travelers’ immune system be affected, he wondered? How might biological pathogens develop differently in space? Melding insights he gleaned from his experience volunteering with Emergency Medical Services and interning in Obstetrics and Gynecolocy at Yale-New Haven hospital with what he learned in classes in biology, anatomy, physiology, chemistry, and physics, Omar framed a stellar research project on the effect of gravity on bacterial cell walls. The research struck NASA as important enough to send into space.  Omar will attend the University of Pennsylvania, where he will major in biology and concentrate in neurobiology.


Peter Zhan  Foster City, California (Aragon High School, San Mateo, CA).    Peter Zhan was stuck by the fact that while there was an increasing amount of quantitative research on the impact of global warming on the physical world, research into the impact of global warming on biological systems was generally descriptive and inexact.  He decided to integrate his knowledge of calculus, chemistry, biology and statistics to design a project that statistically quantified the effects of global warming on primitive biological organisms. He conceived of the project, designed the protocols, and carried out the experiments and analyses. His award-winning research quantified the ways in which bacteria’s metabolic rates and simple chemical reaction rates were affected by temperature change, a topic that has potentially important significance for environmental science.  Next year he plans to major in chemical engineering at Yale University.

2011 Honorable Mentions

Titania Green, Bridgeport, CT (Central Magnet High School, Bridgeport Regional Acqualture Science & Technology Education Center, Bridgeport CT). Titania Green was concerned about pollution in the Long Island Sound. Nitrogen being continuously discharged into the Sound was promoting the excessive growth of algae, which in turn was preventing enough sunlight  from reaching shallow areas where submerged aquatic vegetation grew--plants that served as a habitat for shellfish and juvenile fish. Titania came up with an experiment that replicated local pollution levels in the lab to explore whether local oysters could help remove excess nitrogen from the waters around them. She is submitting her original findings to a scientific journal. Next year she will major in Environmental Studies at Green Mountain College. 


Claire Pershan, Hamden, CT (Hopkins School, New Haven). When she learned that budget cuts had forced schools in New Haven to reduce or in some cases eliminate arts and music programs entirely, Claire Pershan recalled how important music had been to hear own learning experience in school, and decided to take action. Since music and the arts have been essential to Claire Pershan’s own learning experience. Determined to prevent inner-city students in New Haven from being deprived of the opportunity to make music themselves, Claire created “Vocal for Change,” a performing a capella choral group for children in two New Haven schools. Next year she will be studying education, English and environmental studies at Pomona College.


Qu Siying, China and La Grange, NC (Arendell Parrott Academy, Kinston, NC; Wayne Country Day School, Goldsboro, NC). During the nineteen-hour plane ride from China to the U.S., Qu Siying found it impossible to find a comfortable position for sitting or sleeping in her coach-class seat. Her body ached for two days from the contortions she had put it through. Months later that nineteen-hour trip in the other direction was an even greater ordeal for her American host mother, whose medical problems made it even harder for her to sit comfortably. Qu Siying decided to address this problem by using fabric and metal rods to modify a laptop bag into an innovative seat-extender that folds to the size of a  laptop (with a strap that lets it be carried on board as hand luggage) to provide greater comfort for airline travelers. Next year she will study design at Parsons School of Design, hoping to learn the professional skills she needs to work as a fashion designer when she returns home to China.


Joel Luis Suarez, New Haven, CT (Cooperative Arts and Humanities Highs School, New Haven, CT; Eli Whitney High School, Hamden, CT). Joel Suarez never lost sight of the fact that he came from “a low-income urban community in the state with the largest achievement gap in the United States.” He also recognized how crucial it was to him to have had the chance to learn filmmaking techniques from a local non-profit media design studio.  To give children younger than himself a sense that they, too, could find pleasure and satisfaction in the creative arts, Joel  designed  and taught film workshops for “at risk” youth in New Haven. Next year he plans to major in film at Quinnipiac University.

              

 

 
mfs_footer