School Notes: Yale College
March/April 2013

Alumnus wins Mitchell Scholarship

Harold McNamara (Branford ’11), a Gates Cambridge Scholarship recipient currently studying micro- and nanotechnology in Cambridge, England, has won a George J. Mitchell Scholarship, which will take him to Trinity College in Dublin next year. 

The scholarship, sponsored by the US-Ireland Alliance, is named in honor of the former US senator who made a pivotal contribution to the Northern Ireland peace process. It is designed to introduce and connect generations of future American leaders to the island of Ireland, while recognizing and fostering intellectual achievement, leadership, and a commitment to public service and community. McNamara has helped develop medical imaging technology and plans to pursue a doctorate in physics.

Two seniors named Churchill Scholars

Two Yale seniors—Kavitha Anandalingam of Saybrook College and Jonathan Liang of Ezra Stiles College—have been selected as Churchill Scholars and will study at the University of Cambridge next fall.

Anandalingam, a biomedical engineering major, is a Beckman Scholar who has worked on a new gene therapy technique for cystic fibrosis. She is planning a new interdisciplinary research project on motor control, with a long-term goal of creating neural prosthetic devices that can perform the function of limbs damaged as the result of disease or injury. 

Liang, a molecular biophysics and biochemistry major, is a Goldwater Scholar who studies RNA regulatory elements known as riboswitches and is interested in the role of non-coding RNA in human disease. He plans to complete coursework in computational biology and work on a project to understand the global genomic profile of breast cancer.

A record nine Yale Rhodes Scholars

Nine Yale students—seven undergraduates and two recent alumni—will be studying in Britain as Rhodes Scholars next fall, a record number of Yale students chosen in one year and the highest number of 2013 US Rhodes Scholars from a single university. The award provides all expenses for two or three years of study at the University of Oxford. This year’s winners are: Jennifer Bright (Davenport ’13); David Carel (Pierson ’13); Julian De Freitas (Saybrook ’13); Rhiana Gunn-Wright (Saybrook ’11); Micah Johnson (Trumbull ’13); Catherine Laporte-Oshiro (Calhoun ’13); Benjamine Liu (Trumbull ’12); Dakota McCoy (Branford ’13); and Ela Naegele (Morse ’13).