Boston – Parvinder Thiara had just finished his freshman year at Harvard University when his grandfather in India died of infectious diarrhea. The death affected him profoundly.
“Then I found that 2.2 million people – 1.8 million of them are children – die each year from infectious waterborne diseases,” said Thiara, a chemistry major.
Thiara’s work to improve and protect the world’s water supplies – and prevent deaths like his grandfather’s – helped him become one of the 32 men and women across the United States selected as Rhodes scholars for 2007. The students, announced Sunday by the scholarship fund, will enter Oxford University in England next October.
Thiara, 21, of Rochelle, Ill., is the co-founder of an organization dedicated to improving water-sanitation technologies, particularly in impoverished regions.
“We’re trying to develop natural products that can be grown and easily processed,” said Thiara, who plans to study theoretical chemistry and water-science policy and management at Oxford. “We’re just trying to develop the means to make it effective on a rural, local scale.”
The scholars, selected from 896 applicants endorsed by 340 colleges and universities, will join scholars selected from 13 other jurisdictions around the world. About 85 are selected each year. The scholarships provide two or three years of study, with the total value averaging about $45,000 per year.
Rhodes scholarships were created in 1902 by the will of British philanthropist Cecil Rhodes. Winners are selected on the basis of high academic achievement, personal integrity, leadership potential and physical vigor, among other attributes.
Colorado boasts one Rhodes scholar, Charles R. Salmen of Glenwood Springs, a senior English major at Duke University who will study medical anthropology at Oxford.
Many of the recipients have already spent time overseas.
Whitney Haring-Smith spent the summer working for a U.N.- funded disarmament program in Afghanistan and also spent time with the U.N.’s refugee agency in Sri Lanka.
“It was really good to see the nitty-gritty of international relations,” said Haring-Smith, 21, a Providence, R.I., native and senior at Yale University.
He called the Rhodes scholarship “an opportunity to engage some very important questions about where and how we shape policy.”
Building societies
Zachary Manfredi, a senior at Atlanta’s Emory University, interned in the democracy program of the Carter Center, working on civil society-building programs and election monitoring in the Congo, Ivory Coast and Haiti.
“As a Rhodes scholar, I’ll get to work on important political causes and also to keep asking important philosophic questions. It’s a synthesis of my two greatest loves, justice and knowledge,” said Manfredi, 21, of Rochester, Mich.
Kevin Shenderov, 19, a biochemistry major at New York University, has already been involved in conducting cancer research and was an organizer of a world health conference that dealt with problems affecting health services in the developing world.
Like his older brother, Eugene, also a Rhodes scholar, Shenderov plans to study for a doctorate in immunology at Oxford.
“I want to be able to help create a more effective cancer vaccine,” he said Sunday.
The Shenderov family emigrated from Ukraine in 1990.
