Every year, 14 students from across the nation receive the Churchill Scholarship, allowing them to pursue graduate level studies in the sciences, mathematics and engineering with a full scholarship at the University of Cambridge. In January 2013, two seniors, Tiras Lin and Lay Kodama, were awarded the prestigious Churchill.
Kodama is from Columbus, Ohio and graduated last semester as a neuroscience major with a Writing Seminars minor. Tiras Lin is a mechanical engineering major from San Rafael, Calif. Lin and Kodama are two of the twelve total Johns Hopkins students to have received the Churchill Scholarship since its beginnings in 1963.
“Initially they told me that I wasn’t allowed to say anything for a couple days. But I had to run outside and take a lap! I was very excited and I feel honored to be selected as a Churchill scholar,” Lin said.
“I was extremely excited to receive the news, but most of all relieved that I had secured a concrete plan for the next year. The email notification made it clear that I was not to inform anyone, besides my family, of the results until the official announcements were made. I had to wait about a week to tell my friends and professors the news!” Kodama wrote in an email to The News-Letter.
Once the recipients were made public, both students were able to share their success with important people to them at Hopkins.
Lin worked closely with Director of Fellowships and Scholarships Kelly Barry on his application. It is an extensive application process to be selected by the Winston Churchill Foundation of the United States for a scholarship. Within each college campus, there is an internal selection process, after which two students are chosen to then compete at that national level, according to Kodama. After that process, 14 students are chosen overall.
Both Lin and Kodama will be pursuing a Masters of Philosophy degree in Cambridge next year with full tuition as well as living expenses covered by the foundation. These two students have partaken in research at Hopkins that will serve as foundation for their studies abroad.
“At Hopkins, I am interested in mechanical engineering, which is what I am studying, and I’m particularly interested in fluid dynamics. That is, the physics of liquids and gases. In addition, I’ve been working on a project at that involves photography. In this project, I’ve been working with Rajat Mittal, a professor of mechanical engineering, and we work on recording high-speed videos of insects. Therefore, these two interests came together and I decided to focus on something using photography in order to study fluid dynamics. It’s great because this is something that Cambridge excels at,” Lin said.
Kodama’s undergraduate experience was diverse, splitting her time between writing and scientific research. She played violin in the Hopkins Symphony Orchestra and was Vice President and Layout Editor for Thoroughfare at Hopkins, and her Cambridge experience guarantees further research.
“Most of my time outside of classes was spent doing research in Dr. Mark Wu’s lab studying feeding behavior of fruit flies,” Kodama said. “I will be pursuing a Master of Philosophy degree at Cambridge working in Professor Christine Holt’s lab. I will be working on a research project understanding the mechanisms of how axons develop connections in the brain through growth cone mediated guidance. This process is not only relevant during development of the nervous system, but also post-injury, and I hope to study the detailed molecular mechanisms of this process in order to understand how this process can be re-triggered after an injury.”
Last year, Neuroscience major Hannah Joo was also awarded the Churchill scholarship.
“Hannah is in Cambridge now, but just she was actually in Baltimore just a couple of weeks ago. The three of us got dinner with Dr. Barry and discussed the opportunity,” Lin said.
