The Mitchell Scholarship
The US-Ireland Alliance announced the 12 members of the George J. Mitchell Scholar Class of 2023 following virtual interviews earlier today. One of the country’s most prestigious scholarship programs, it sends future American leaders to the island of Ireland for a year of graduate study.
This year, 351 individuals applied for the 12 scholarships. Among the recipients are a New York Times reporter, a renewable energy scholar with an interest in Ireland’s peat bogs, a former Youth Poet Laureate of Los Angeles, and a future physician who emigrated from Aleppo, Syria, at the beginning of the war.
This was Carolina Chavez’s last selection process as the Director of the Mitchell Scholarship program. Trina Vargo, founder and president of the US-Ireland Alliance, thanked Carolina for her service, “Carolina has been with the program for more than five years and we’re grateful for her contributions to the program. She will continue to do important work for the international section of the US Department of Labor, managing labor rights-related projects, mostly in Mexico.” Carolina noted, “I’m excited about my new role but I will also miss working with Trina, the Scholars and everyone associated with the Mitchell Scholarship.”
Members of the selection committee included Monica Bell, a Mitchell Scholar alum and Associate Professor of Law and Associate Professor of Sociology at Yale; Orla Keane, Deputy Ambassador at the Irish Embassy in Washington; Robert Mulcare, a Mitchell Scholar alum and Managing Director at New Mountain Capital in New York City; Marc O Griofa, Medical Director at the Recuperative Care Center, Las Vegas and an Aquanaut, physician and support diver for NASA; and Cóilín Parsons, Associate Professor of English and Director of the Global Irish Studies Initiative at Georgetown University.
Major supporters of the program include Ireland’s Department of Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science and Morgan Stanley. Modern Hire provides the crucial video component part of the interview process. The Scholars will begin their studies in Ireland in September 2022.
George J. Mitchell Scholars, Class of 2023
Adedolapo Adedokun, a resident of East Brunswick, New Jersey, is a senior at MIT studying Electrical Engineering and Computer Science with a Minor in Music. He served as MIT’s Chapter President of the National Society of Black Engineers and fully funded a cohort of fifteen members to attend Afrotech, a black technology conference in Oakland, for the first time in chapter history. He engaged with local schools to support black youth engagement in STEM. He has served as a Director for the Harvard-MIT COOP, the official bookstore for the Harvard and MIT communities, and a philanthropic organization supporting student groups and local initiatives. Dolapo also serves as Professional Chair of Chocolate City, a brotherhood of MIT students and alumni who identify with urban culture. Outside of his engagement in the MIT community, he is also a guitarist in a jazz band. Dolapo learned about Music Generation, the national music education initiative in Ireland that aims to give every child in Ireland access to the arts. Inspired by Music Generation, Dolapo envisions a future where every child in the US has access to the arts and believes technology is the key to unlocking that future. He began to build technology to democratize access to the creative process through music using programming languages he learned about at MIT. To develop the expertise in building and designing systems for future work democratizing access to music and the arts, Dolapo will study Computer Science at Trinity.
Abigail Barton, a resident of Leland, Michigan, is a senior at Brown University studying Public Policy and American Studies. She serves as Co-Director of Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere (HOPE), a student-run housing justice organization that works to provide for the immediate needs of the unhoused community in Rhode Island, while fighting to dismantle the structural causes of housing insecurity and homelessness. A central effort she spearheaded over the last year was a state-wide public outreach effort, in partnership with the Rhode Island Center for Justice, to inform tenants of their rights under the CDC eviction moratorium. With a summer internship at the National Low Income Housing Coalition in Washington, Abby built and maintained a public index of state-level emergency eviction protections issued due to COVID-19. Abby is a nationally certified EMT and works a weekly, 12-hour shift at Brown. During the pandemic, that care extended to students quarantined across the 3 dormitories Brown maintained for isolation housing. Motivated by public health mitigation efforts, Abby noted that the United States and Ireland instituted nationwide moratoria on most residential evictions. Constitutional protections of individual property rights in both countries, coupled with decades an extreme lack of decent, affordable housing, resulted in exceptionally high rates of homelessness and widespread tenant disenfranchisement long before the pandemic struck. Wishing to study how Ireland is addressing these issues, Abby will study Law at the National University of Ireland, Galway.
Sarah Bernt resides in Somerville, Massachusetts, and works for the city of Somerville as Community Engagement Specialist and Social Media Manager. She graduated in 2019 from Northeastern University with a degree in Political Science. She managed Mayor Joe Curtatone’s successful reelection campaign in Somerville and previously interned in the office of Senator Ed Markey. Mayor Curtatone credits Sarah with sounding the alarm about COVID-19 before most policymakers had fully realized the threat. She assisted Mayor Curtatone with organizing a regional summit of policy makers and scientific experts that was attended by mayors and city/town managers from thirty municipalities, including the mayor of Boston and the Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts. As a direct result of that initial meeting, municipal leaders throughout Massachusetts decided to act together and enact immediate COVID-19 mitigation measures. Sarah has been to the peace wall in Belfast, saw the Green Line between Israel and Palestine, and what remains of the wall in Germany, and she grapples with the ways in which her own city is divided. Boston’s legacy of racism and segregation touches every aspect of life: housing, education, and public safety, among others. She thought about walls, both seen and unseen, when she taught advocacy skills to students in the Boston public schools and watched them bump up against the constraints of a system that was not designed for them. Sarah will study Conflict Resolution and Reconciliation at Trinity College Dublin (Belfast).
Gilbert Guerra, a resident of Arlington, Virginia, is an Academic Programs Associate at the American Enterprise Institute, where he recently organized the institute’s first-ever National Student Conference on Hispanic Politics. He is a 2019 graduate of Swarthmore College, where he obtained a BA in Political Science with high honors. He served as President of the Swarthmore Conservative Society and was co-president of the Achieving Black and Latino Leadership and Excellence group and spent weekends tutoring fellow low-income and first-generation youth as they prepared to apply to college. Gil’s writing has been published in the Washington Examiner (“Surprise: Nobody owns the Latino vote”) and American Purpose (A book review of “The Hispanic Republican”). He also has a forthcoming book review of Thomas H. O’Connor’s “The Boston Irish: A Political History” that examines the political trajectory of the Irish in Boston and how their journey into the American mainstream can inform current debates about assimilation and political identity among recent immigrant groups. From an early age, he understood that the border between Mexico and the United States was often the lens through which other people viewed him. He was captivated by the power that this border held over his life, and as he grew older, he developed an intellectual passion for examining the ways that borders shape conflicts and identities. Drawn to the differences between borders, he sees the Irish border at once more porous and historically more militarized, more disputed, and ultimately more directly tied to identity. Gil will study Global Security and Borders at Queen’s University Belfast.
Samuel Kessler, of Campbellsville, Kentucky, is a senior at the University of Louisville, where he will obtain a BS in Applied Geography and individualized Liberal Studies BA for Public Policy & Environmental Mitigation. Sam has been recognized for developments in water sampling with the KY Institute for the Environment & Sustainable Development and holds a pending patent with the US Geological Survey. Sam co-founded UofL’s first peer-reviewed journal for student research and founded the Commonwealth Policy Coalition, a non-profit think tank linking university knowledge with legislative partners to develop solutions. From Sam’s work related to environmental economics of Kentucky’s bourbon industry, the think tank drafted a bill poised for introduction in the state legislature. Sam is a Congressman Hal Rogers Scholar, and Intake Specialist for the Kentucky Resources Council. He sees promise for renewable biogas energy in Kentucky from bourbon stillage wastes -- the same found in Irish whiskey production. Charged by the University Provost to serve the Sustainability Council, he is one of 2 student authors of UofL's Climate Action Plan and coordinated negotiations to transition campus to renewable biogas energy using local methane sources and value-extracting biotechnology from UofL’s Conn Center for Renewable Energy. Sam researched this technology with CONN Center scientists and developed a proposal to use peat moss as a lower-carbon renewable biocoal replacement for coal or peat, which may yield revenue from moss cultivation and carbon-sink conservation of peat bogs like those in Ireland. Sam will study Public Policy at UCD.
Aadi Kulkarni, a resident of Far Hills, New Jersey, is studying Policy Analysis & Management as a senior at Cornell University. He co-founded and is CEO of Polici.org, a startup that uses machine learning techniques to summarize peer-reviewed academic research papers to an eighth grade reading level and disseminates those summaries to traditionally underserved populations. The start-up received several awards and was accepted to accelerator programs. Aadi served as the President of the Cornell International Affairs Review and founded Cornell’s Office of Student Government Relations. He was also a research assistant on an NSF funded project with researchers at Cornell, Microsoft Research, and UC Berkeley, assisting in automating data collection and designing methods related to ethics in technical college departments. He contributed to findings suggesting a major lack of ethics education for students building our technological future. Aadi was an intern for Senator Cory Booker; for the House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce; and was a Campaign Fellow for Biden for President serving as an aide to the National Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) Director. As a Research Associate for Harvard Law School’s Library Innovation Lab, he helped build legal technology by integrating 50 state codes to H20, an open casebook platform, in Python, Java and HTML. Aadi wants to dedicate his career to the process of digitizing government to bring basic services to Americans in an accessible and cost-effective way. Aadi will study Social Data Analytics at University College Dublin.
Asha Larson-Baldwin, a resident of Greenville, South Carolina, is a senior at Furman University where she will obtain a degree in Advocacy and Justice Studies. She is the university’s the first Black female Student Body President in over ten years. She also served as the President of College Democrats and of the Furman Justice Forum. She has conducted research examining student perceptions of universities’ efforts to reckon with their ties to slavery and the impacts of gentrification on small business owners in West Greenville. Asha created a summer internship for low-income students in her community, including programming for students to learn about leadership, advocacy, and activism. As a 16-year-old, Asha started a petition to change the name of her high school, which is named for the largest slave owner in South Carolina. Her efforts included sitting on panels of community leaders three times her age, in front of one hundred community members debating the impact and importance of public symbolism and the need to remove Confederate monuments. She was interviewed by local news media, wrote op-eds for the local newspaper, spoke at school board, city council, and county council meetings, and organized a peaceful community demonstration in response to racist graffiti attacks against her. Despite more than 10,000 signatures on the petition, the high school is still named Wade Hampton High School. This experience has led to a fierce interest in studying public history, symbolism, and where community memory comes from. Asha will study Public History at Queen’s University Belfast.
Rhiannon McGavin, a resident of Los Angeles, graduated from UCLA in 2020 with a degree in English. She was the Youth Poet Laureate of Los Angeles in 2016 and has had multiple recognitions for her writing. She has performed her poetry at the Hollywood Bowl, the Library of Congress, and on NPR. For the last five years, she has worked as a polling clerk in her neighborhood for every city, state, and federal election. She volunteers as a District Leader for National Nurses United, working to urge California to pass universal healthcare. Since she was a child, she has volunteered for Alexandria House, a transitional shelter for women and children. Rhiannon would use her Mitchell year to finish her third poetry collection, Computer Room, which explores the emotional realities of technology. She finds that a “computer room” changes shape based on context. In the machine realm, it is a storage vault of servers. In historical terms, it might be the break room for the women mathematicians who were the first "computers". For many people of her generation, the computer room was a space designated for the desktop. As digital technology became more portable, that room disappeared alongside the boundary between private life and public connection. As her honors thesis, Computer Room was awarded the UCLA English Department’s Thompson Prize for Outstanding Thesis, the highest prize possible for undergraduate thesis research. Rhiannon will study Creative Writing at Trinity College Dublin.
Naoum Fares Marayati, a resident of Kernerville, North Carolina, is currently a medical student at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. He obtained his BA in psychology at Princeton, where he studied bilingual child development. Born in Aleppo, Syria, Fares’ family immigrated to the US when he was in the 10th grade, just as the war was beginning. He is interested in pediatric healthcare, global health, and refugee resettlement, particularly early interventions that shift the ways displaced children and families navigate new geographies. Fares wants to build on ways to provide holistic trauma-informed healthcare to displaced children, understanding the ways in which loss, guilt, survival, otherness, and pain interact and impact health needs, care-seeking behaviors, and access. Fares serves as Vice President of Student Council at Mount Sinai and as a Clinic Manager at the East Harlem Health Outreach Partnership, Mount Sinai’s student-run free clinic for East Harlem residents without health insurance. In this capacity, he was a Student Organizer for Mount Sinai’s COVID-19 Student Task Force where he led initiatives to support the Mount Sinai and East Harlem communities during the peak months of the COVID-19 pandemic in New York City, and the continuity of remote care and daily necessities for members of the community. He received a Neuroscience Research Foundation Grant presented by Dr. Joseph Maroon from the University of Pittsburgh, for the study of Hyperbaric Oxygen as a potential treatment for COVID-19 infection and recovery. Fares will study Global Health at Trinity College Dublin.
Swati Ravi, a resident of Plano, Texas, is a senior at Columbia University studying Astrophysics. She is the recipient of an international award, organized by Aviation Week Network, that recognizes the top 20 most promising aerospace students in their twenties. As a Science Research Fellow at Columbia, Swati participated in computational astrophysics research, working to model distant galaxies with high-resolution near-field stars. She developed an astronaut tool to help detect hazardous portions of handrails on the International Space Station. She did this in collaboration with NASA's Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory where her device was tested. She won first place for her paper about that project at the 2021 AIAA SciTech Forum, the world's largest conference for aerospace research and development. She also won the NASA Student Payload Opportunity with Citizen Science competition. She led a team of 25 students in designing a project to study the effects of microgravity on antibiotic resistance of bacteria. This project will fly to the International Space Station in December 2021. Swati served as president of the Columbia Space Initiative, an aerospace engineering student club with 120 active members. Swati also oversaw Columbia University’s math and science tutoring outreach program with three New York City public schools, and she teaches weekly math lessons to a group of 20 first through third-grade students in an after-school program targeted to low-income students in Harlem. Swati is interested in Dublin’s unique position as an aerospace subsystems engineering hub. She will study Space, Science and Technology at University College Dublin.
Allison Watkins, of Brooklyn, NY, is a journalist at the New York Times. She was recognized as a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in national reporting for a series of articles that exposed the CIA’s attempted cover-up of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on the agency’s post 9-11 torture program. Currently covering the crime beat in New York City, she was also recognized by the News Leaders Association as part of a package of reporting that examined police brutality, impunity, and use of force. She was also recognized by the Silurians Press Club for a story that highlighted how gentrification had pushed out traditional fight clubs in New York City, erasing a critical support for at-risk youth. She was also recognized with the New York Times’ Publisher’s Award for reporting about a respected ER doctor in New York City who died by suicide during at the height of the COVID pandemic, sparking a national conversation about mental health in the healthcare industry. She would use her Mitchell year writing and researching a journalistic non-fiction project about ties between the Irish American diaspora and Irish rebel groups, during the period following the War of Independence through the Troubles. A graduate of Temple University, she was a member of the Division One rowing team while also working as a part-time reporter in Washington, DC. Ali will study Writing at National University of Ireland, Galway.
Maxine Wragan, a resident of Great Falls, Virginia, is a senior at the University of Pennsylvania studying Neuroscience. After studying Neuroscience for two years at Pomona College, she transferred to UPenn to join the Eisch Lab at Children’s Hospital of Pennsylvania (CHOP) to research brain injury. A Goldwater Scholar, Max researched the developmental time course of microglia in the hippocampus. More specifically, she studied explored sex-based differences in microglial density or morphology. She will be the second author on a publication about this research currently being prepared. She is the co-author of two other publications. At Pomona College, Max founded and co-directed the National Satellite Learning Program (SLP) to provide virtual individual tutoring for students experiencing homelessness. She then received Penn’s Campaign for Community social impact grant to extend the program to serve homeless Philadelphia youth. At the Philadelphia’s Veterans Affairs (VA) hospital, Max volunteered at the COVID-19 vaccination clinic and in the rehabilitation clinic, assisting with physical therapy for veterans with spinal injuries. Her interest in traumatic brain injury and its impact on chronic pain and neuroinflammation stems largely from her experience as a patient of neuroscience based medical care. In high school, she was injured as a pedestrian in a car accident, sustaining serious spine and head injuries. Max ultimately, plans to run a lab researching the impact and potential treatments of traumatic brain injury, neuroinflammation, and pain. If selected as a Mitchell Scholar, Max will study Neuroscience at Trinity College Dublin.