32 U.S. college students named Rhodes Scholars

BOSTON -- Harvard senior Parvinder Thiara's life was reshaped when his beloved grandfather died of infectious diarrhea from drinking tainted water in India while Thiara prepared to begin his second year in college.\n"Then I found that 2.2 million people -- 1.8 million of them are children -- die each year from infectious, waterborne diseases," said Thiara, a chemistry major.\nThiara's work to improve and protect the world's water supplies -- and prevent deaths like his grandfather's -- helped him become one of the 32 men and women across the United States selected as Rhodes Scholars for 2007. The students, announced Sunday by the scholarship fund, will enter Oxford University in England next October.\nThiara, 21, of Rochelle, Ill., is the co-founder of an organization dedicated to improving water sanitation technologies, particularly in impoverished regions.\n"We're trying to develop natural products that can be grown and easily processed," said Thiara, who plans to study theoretical chemistry and water science policy and management at Oxford. "We're just trying to develop the means to make it effective on a rural, local scale."\nThe scholars were selected from 896 applicants endorsed by 340 colleges and universities and will join scholars selected from 13 other jurisdictions around the world. Approximately 85 are selected each year. The scholarships provide two or three years of study, with the total value averaging about $45,000 per year.\nRhodes Scholarships were created in 1902 by the will of British philanthropist Cecil Rhodes. Winners are selected on the basis of high academic achievement, personal integrity, leadership potential and physical vigor, among other attributes.\nMany of the recipients have already spent time overseas.\nWhitney Haring-Smith spent the summer working for a U.N.-funded disarmament program in Afghanistan and also spent time with the U.N.'s refugee agency in Sri Lanka.\n"It was really good to see the nitty-gritty of international relations," said Haring-Smith, 21, a Providence, R.I., native and senior at Yale University.\nHe called the Rhodes Scholarship "an opportunity to engage some very important questions about where and how we shape policy."\nZachary Manfredi, a senior at Atlanta's Emory University, interned in the democracy program of The Carter Center, working on civil society building programs and election monitoring in Congo, Ivory Coast and Haiti.\n"As a Rhodes Scholar, I'll get to work on important political causes and also to keep asking important philosophic questions. It's a synthesis of my two greatest loves, justice and knowledge," said Manfredi, 21, of Rochester, Mich.\nAt Emory, Manfredi has maintained a 3.99 grade point average while pursuing a triple major in philosophy, international relations and comparative literature and a minor in French.\nKevin Shenderov immigrated with his family from Ukraine in 1990; he and his brother suffered health problems as a result of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster.\nNow a 19-year-old biochemistry major at New York University, Shenderov has already been involved in conducting cancer research and was an organizer of a world health conference that dealt with problems affecting health services in the developing world. Like his older brother, Eugene, also a Rhodes Scholar, Shenderov plans to study for a doctorate in immunology at Oxford.\n"I want to be able to help create a more effective cancer vaccine," he said Sunday.\nMaria Repnikova arrived in America from Latvia at 14 without knowing English but immersed herself in language classes and graduated this year from Georgetown\n University.\n"Migration turned my life around," Repnikova said in a university statement. "I intend to be someone who makes comparable opportunity securely available to the millions of people who in the years ahead must face and cross the borders of our globalized world."\nShe has blended an interest in China, after studying in Beijing, with her curiosity about Russia -- a subject she was prevented from studying while in Latvia -- to produce her current research focus on Chinese immigrant labor in northeast Russia.