Penn State Senior Wins Multiple Awards for Graduate Study in England
Danielle S. Perry, a senior from Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania, has been offered multiple awards for graduate research abroad. Perry, a physics major and math minor in Penn State's Schreyer Honors College, has won a Winston Churchill Scholarship and a National Institutes of Health-Cambridge University Fellowship, both of which are for graduate study at Cambridge University in England, as well as a Fulbright Fellowship for research at the Brain Dynamics Centre in Sydney, Australia.
Perry is the first Penn State student to ever win either the Winston Churchill Scholarship or the National Institutes of Health-Cambridge University Fellowship.
She has accepted the NIH-Cambridge Fellowship, which is worth about $250,000 and will fully fund five years of research on the human brain, particularly involving linguistic and speech processing, at Cambridge University, as part of a collaborative project between the university and the United States National Institutes of Health (NIH), the largest medical-research facility in the world. Perry also has accepted the Churchill Scholarship, which is worth about $30,000 and will fund one year of research in the physics of hearing, also at Cambridge. Her work at the prestigious university will begin in October 2004.
"All of the scholarships offer wonderful opportunities," she said. "I was very excited to find out I had been one of the few chosen, especially because I was the first student from Penn State to get two of them."
Perry is also a winner of a Clare Luce Booth Scholarship for two years of graduate study through Boston University. However, because all of these awards were bestowed to Perry this year, she was unable to accept all four. She has declined the Booth Scholarship, and she hopes eventually to use some of the funds from the Fulbright Fellowship, also valued at about $30,000, to research brain activity in schizophrenic patients in Sydney.
Perry previously has received various national awards from the NIH and the National Science Foundation, as well as awards for her research in science and engineering at Penn State from the Eberly College of Science and from the Society for Distinguished Alumni. She recently was named 2004's Most Achieving Undergraduate Woman of the Year by Penn State's Commission on Women.
Home-schooled from age 4 through the high-school-graduate level, Perry attended a nursing school, the Reading Hospital School of Nursing, near her home. After a year and a half, she was at the top of her class but decided she would rather pursue the physical sciences. She transferred to Penn State and attended the Berks campus for three semesters before coming to Penn State's main campus at University Park as a junior in the fall semester of 2002.
Since her arrival, Perry has involved herself in research in the two areas that interest her most: physical chemistry and comparative literature. "I have a long-standing love of literature, physics, and psychology," she said. "A broad range of topics has captured my excitement for several years, and most of my projects have several things in common: neuroscience, hearing, speech, and language. I hope to build a research career on the connections between these fields, particularly on the brain's role in language difficulties." She added that she hopes her work in science and medicine will help others experience life in new ways.
Her research to date includes projects on magnetic fields and Japanese literature. She also has completed research on nerve impulses at Bucknell University.
Since the spring of 2003, Perry has been doing research at Penn State with Christine Keating, assistant professor of chemistry, on cell dynamics. She uses synthetic cells, which are liquid materials surrounded by a fatty membrane, to study reactivity and other properties of biological cells. Some of this research was done in collaboration with the NIH Biomaterials and Bionanotechnology Summer Institute.
Perry has participated in several presentations and poster sessions around the state, as well as a national conference in Salt Lake City, Utah, to exhibit the findings of her research. She has served as a teaching assistant and a tutor for science and math classes at Penn State. She is an English language mentor in the International Hospitality Council at Penn State, and she has done volunteer work in North Carolina and the Dominican Republic. She is a co-founder of Penn State's student chapter of the Association for Women in Mathematics, and she is the treasurer of Penn State's Society of Physics Students. She is also a member of the Association for Women in Science and the American Physical Society. She belongs to several honor societies, including Golden Key, Phi Beta Kappa, Sigma Pi Sigma, and Phi Kappa Phi. In addition, she is involved in the Lutheran Campus Ministry.
While attending Penn State Berks, Perry worked closely with one of her professors, Thomas Lynn, assistant professor of English, who has since become a mentor to her. "He tutored me in poetry and in life in general," she said. "He is someone who has always believed in me."
Lynn said one of Perry's distinctive traits is her knowledge of--and her ability to engage in conversations about--a wide range of topics, including physics, music, and religion. "The discussions I have had with her made me realize that, in addition to her intellectual ability, Dani is a remarkably sensitive and conscientious person. Her affinity for teaching and her concern for others, for doing good in our world, make her a very likeable individual," he said.
In her spare time, Perry enjoys surfing, skydiving, landscaping, and traveling. She also plays the piano and the flute, and she writes poetry. She has 10 siblings, two of whom will study at Oxford University in England in the fall. Danielle is the daughter of Holly Zurn Perry, of Drexel Hill, and John Francis Perry, of Birdsboro, Pennsylvania.
CONTACTS:
Danielle S. Perry, dsp145@psu.edu
Thomas J. Lynn, tjl7@psu.edu, 610-396-6298