School Notes: Yale College
January/February 2014

Seven win prestigious scholarships

Four alums and three seniors will be studying next year in Great Britain, the alums as Marshall Scholars and the seniors as Rhodes Scholars. 

The Marshall Scholarship winners, all of them from the Class of ’13, are Alyssa Bilinski, who will pursue a MSc in health policy, planning, and financing—cotaught at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) and the London School of Economics and Political Science—followed by an MSc in epidemiology at LSHTM; Tantum “Teddy” Collins, who will pursue an MPhil in international relations at Oxford University; Natalia Emanuel, who will study evidence-based social intervention at Oxford; and Derek Park, who will pursue doctoral work at Oxford, researching the evolutionary biology of cancer.

The three Rhodes Scholarship winners, who will all be at Oxford, are Isabel Beshar, who will be studying medical anthropology; Suzanna Fritzberg, who will be studying comparative social policy, and Vinay Nayak, who will be studying public policy and the social science of the Internet.

Alumna named Calhoun dean

April Ruiz (MC ’05) was named Calhoun’s new residential college dean in December by Yale College dean Mary Miller and Calhoun master Jonathan Holloway. Ruiz, who was a freshman counselor as an undergraduate and currently holds the position of assistant director for Yale College fellowships at the Center for International and Professional Experience, has taught Introduction to Cognitive Science in Yale Summer Session and has been both a freshman adviser and sophomore adviser for Morse College students. After Miller and Holloway introduced her in the Calhoun dining hall, Ruiz paid tribute to Calhoun dean Leslie Woodard, who died unexpectedly in October: “Calhoun would not be where it is today without [Woodard’s] devotion to all of you and her devotion to this day,” Ruiz said. “I want to love this college as fully as she did.” In January, Ruiz will move into the college and will be joined by her fiancé Neil Catapano, who is completing a second degree, in diagnostic imaging, at Quinnipiac University, and by their one-year-old dog, Benjamin.