Contact: Rick Peterson, Manager of News Services, 920/832-6590
For Immediate Release April 8, 1999
Lawrence University Students Selected for Two National Awards
APPLETON, WIS. -- Two Lawrence University students have been named
recipients of prestigious national academic awards.
Stephen Rodgers has been awarded a Mellon Fellowship in Humanistic
Studies by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. Rodgers was
one of 98 recipients selected from nearly 800 of the nation's top humanities
students. The fellowship provides payment for one year of all graduate
school tuition and fees plus a $14,500 stipend.
Rodgers intends to use his fellowship, which will be worth a total of
nearly $40,000, to pursue a five-year Ph.D. program in music theory at Yale
University beginning this fall. Rodgers earned a bachelor of arts degree
magna cum laude in English and music in 1998. Since graduation, he has
taught in the Lawrence Conservatory of Music and worked in the Lawrence
admissions office. He is the fourth Lawrence student and the first since
1993 to win a Mellon Fellowship since the program started in 1982.
Eight of this year's fellowship winners are from Harvard University,
with Columbia and Princeton universities each accounting for seven
recipients. Lawrence and the University of Wisconsin-Madison were the only
two schools in the state to have a student awarded a Mellon fellowship this
year.
Joanna Boerner, a junior from Northbrook, Ill., majoring in biology,
has been awarded a $7,500 Barry M. Goldwater for outstanding academic merit.
Boerner was selected from a national field of 1,181 mathematics,
science and engineering students nominated from colleges and universities in
all 50 states. A total of 304 scholarships were awarded for the 1999-2000
academic year.
Boerner is the third Lawrence student in the program's 11-year history
to be named a Goldwater Scholar, the premier undergraduate award for
students pursuing careers in mathematics, the natural sciences and
engineering.