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Ursinus Senior Earns Fulbright Award to Study in India
Ben Allwein ’18 will spend one year at the Translational Health Science & Technology Institute in Delhi to research antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis.
Allwein is the eleventh Ursinus student to be awarded a Fulbright scholarship since 2007 and the first since 2015. He one of 65 Fulbright-Nehru research fellows for the 2018-19 academic year from the United States. Fulbright-Nehru Student Research award winners design their own projects and are required to be affiliated with an Indian institution of higher education, a research or training institute, a think tank, or a registered non-government organization.
“My Fulbright research seeks to foster international cooperation between governments and researchers in the hopes that we can address the evolution of antibiotic resistance, an emerging public health crisis in many countries, in a concerted and effective manner,” Allwein says.
A native of New Bloomfield, Perry County, Allwein is a biochemistry and molecular biology major. He is a fellow of the Parlee Center for Science and the Common Good, a Bonner leader, an admissions senior fellow and a student consultant for the Teaching and Learning Institute.
Through those Ursinus opportunities, Allwein says he had learned “the importance of community building and civic engagement; many of the roughly 1,100 hours I’ve dedicated to community service during the last four years have been focused on issues of access to health, education and food security.”
“I have not only learned that I want to use science to address social as well as health problems, but I have also come to appreciate the importance of global scientific collaboration on researching such problems,” he says.
The Fulbright Program aims to increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries. With his selection this year, Allwein joins the flagship international educational exchange program sponsored by the U.S. government, alongside many distinguished figures around the world.
Fulbright alumni have become heads of state, judges, ambassadors, cabinet ministers, CEOs and university presidents, as well as leading journalists, artists, scientists and teachers. They include 59 Nobel Laureates, 82 Pulitzer Prize winners, 71 MacArthur Fellows, 16 Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients, and thousands of leaders across the private, public and non-profit sectors. Since its inception in 1946, more than 380,000 Fulbright award winners have participated in the program.
Allwein has deferred his graduate study at Cornell University so that he can conduct his Fulbright research. He plans to pursue his doctoral degree in molecular biophysics at Weill Cornell Medicine. –By Ed Moorhouse