Schmidgall's Cambridge connection began last year, when she spent Michaelmas (i.e. fall) term in the Cambridge Scholars Program, one of Caltech's four official study abroad programs. "I loved it," she says. "Once you go, you'll go again."
The Marshall Scholarship provides full funding to "intellectually distinguished young Americans" for at least two years of study at any university in the United Kingdom. Schmidgall intends to use the scholarship to pursue two master's degrees: physics at the University of Cambridge and science policy at the University of Edinburgh.
At Caltech, Schmidgall is a double major in physics and history, expecting to graduate June 2007. A fencer and a classically trained violinist, she is currently president of Caltech Hillel.
Her research area is experimental condensed matter physics, which has interested her since the summer of 2002, when as a student in the Research Science Institute at MIT she saw a demonstration of the Meissner-Ochsenfeld effect. Now she plans to continue at Cambridge with her current work in the optical spectroscopy of quantum dots. "It's a new technology that's just starting to be useful," she says. "It'll be cutting-edge."
Schmidgall chose the University of Edinburgh for her second year with the Marshall Scholarship, because its broad science policy program includes physics. Spending summer 2005 at CERN gave her insight into a large international project. "It's impressive to realize the diplomacy that's involved in science," she says. In the long run, Schmidgall hopes for a career in science policy. "There need to be more people working for science in the public area."
The Marshall Scholarships were established by the U.K. Parliament in 1953 to commemorate America's postwar assistance through the European Recovery Program, or Marshall Plan, and "express the continuing gratitude of the British people to their American counterparts." The scholarships are intended to strengthen bonds of understanding between the British and American peoples.
About 40 new scholarships are funded annually by the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, covering tuition and travel, with allowances for books, residence, and dependent spouses. Candidates must be U.S. citizens, holding their first four-year degrees recently as they take up their scholarship. Managed by the British Council, the selection process is highly competitive, with winners chosen from approximately 1,000 candidates annually.
Past Marshall Scholars include Stephen Breyer, Supreme Court Justice; Harold Koh, dean of the Yale Law School; Thomas Friedman, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and Ray Dolby, chairman of Dolby Laboratories. Recent Caltech winners include Eric Tuttle ('01), former president of the Associated Students of the California Institute of Technology, Vikram Mittal ('03), former chair of the ASCIT Board of Control, and Wei Dang ('05), one of the editors of Caltech's Undergraduate Research Journal and now studying on his Marshall at Imperial College London.
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Written by: John Avery Contact: Jill Perry (626) 395-3226 jperry@caltech.edu
Visit the Caltech Media Relations website at http://pr.caltech.edu/media.
Written by John Avery