Allison Truhlar named Gates Cambridge Scholar

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Allison Truhlar

ITHACA, NY (03/24/2011)(readMedia)-- Allison Truhlar, a biological and environmental engineering senior at Cornell University, has been selected to be a Gates Cambridge Scholar. She was one of 30 new recipients of the full boat scholarship for graduate study at the University of Cambridge announced last month by the Gates Cambridge Trust.

The daughter of Stony Brook residents Richard and Mary Truhlar, Allison attended Ward Melville High School. She will study in Cambridge's Department of Zoology with David Aldridge.

"My proposed project will investigate whether the valve movements of freshwater mussels can be used to detect pollution events," she writes on the Gates Cambridge Trust Web site. "After Cambridge, I plan to work towards a Ph.D. in environmental engineering with the ultimate goal of becoming a professor of the subject."

The purpose of the trust is to enable students from any part of the world outside the United Kingdom to benefit from education in the University of Cambridge. It awards scholarships on the following criteria: intellectual ability, leadership capacity, a person's desire to use their knowledge to contribute to society throughout the world by providing service to their communities and applying their talents and knowledge to improve the lives of others, a good fit between the abilities and aspirations of the applicant and what the University of Cambridge can offer in its graduate program.

All applicants for the scholarship apply for–and must gain–admission to the University of Cambridge, in England.