Four seniors awarded top scholarships

Four Duke seniors were recently awarded prestigious scholarships that will allow them to conduct graduate work in the United Kingdom.

Jared Dunnmon, a mechanical engineering and economics double major from Cincinnati, Ohio, was named a Rhodes Scholar Nov. 20. Rhodes Scholarships award students with two to three years of graduate study at the University of Oxford. Dunnmon is Duke’s 43rd Rhodes Scholar.

Seniors Nick Altemose, Katherine Buse and Allie Speidel are three of this year’s Marshall scholarship recipients, which were announced Tuesday. As many as 40 Marshall scholarships are awarded each year.

Barbara Wise, assistant director of the Office of Undergraduate Scholars and Fellows, said Duke should be proud of the recent recipients.

“This is the largest number of Marshall Scholarships [Duke] has ever had, to my knowledge,” Wise said.

Since the founding of the scholarship in 1953, Duke students have won 22 Marshall Scholarships. Marshall Scholars pursue two years of graduate study in the United Kingdom.

Dunnmon said the application and interview process for the Rhodes was an extensive test of character and quick thinking, including the question, “What would you do if you were the governor of Indiana?”

Dunnmon, an Angier B. Duke scholar, plans to study engineering or mathematical modeling. He added that Duke’s curriculum allowed him to pursue his varied interests with relative ease.

Altemose has worked in Willard’s lab for the last three years, researching regions of the human genome that were not included in the Human Genome Project. At Duke, he co-founded an organization that reaches out to local high school students to emphasize research opportunities, and is involved in the selection of A.B. Duke Scholars. He has served as a member of Center for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Life Advisory Board and as a teaching assistant for the computer science department.

As a junior, Altemose won a Goldwater Scholarship in Science, Mathematics and Engineering.

Katherine Buse, an English major from Chapel Hill, plans to pursue graduate work in science fiction and contemporary literature at the University of Liverpool. An A.B. Duke scholar and Faculty Scholar, she has served as editor of Duke’s literary magazine The Archive and worked to organize a speaker series which integrated faculty from the humanities and natural sciences. She was also the co-founder of the “Population Working Group,” the Franklin Humanities Institute’s first undergraduate working group, and is on the A.B. Duke scholar selection committee.

Buse said the application process was an opportunity to introspect about why she would be good at studying literature.

“I had been told that [the application process] was a really tough, backbreaking process that would steal your soul,” Buse wrote in an e-mail. “That was not my experience at all.”

A biomedical engineering major from Manlius, N.Y., Allie Speidel intends to study regenerative tissue engineering at Imperial College London. Speidel said her experiences with the Baldwin Scholars program and the Collegiate Athletic Pre-Medical Experience program were particularly helpful toward the winning of the Marshall scholarship.

“The mentorship and relationships that I have been able to build through those programs have been so powerful,” Speidel said. “Everyone... was extremely helpful with everything from reading over drafts of my essays to helping me prep for the interview.”

Speidel, a member of the women’s varsity swim team, has also worked as a Pratt Fellow in biomedical engineering professor Kam Leong’s lab. She has researched cell differentiation with hopes of understanding how dead cells might be reprogrammed to regenerate dead heart tissue. Speidel has also served as a chemistry and calculus peer tutor and as a first-year advisory counselor.

“Each one of these students has done an amazing job and have been selected because they will be leaders in their fields,” Wise said. “We think it’s just awesome.”