2 students, 1 alumnus named Marshall scholars

Samuel Dorison ’11, Kyle Edwards ’12 and Christina Chang ’12 have been chosen as three of 40 recipients of the 2012 Marshall Scholarship, which funds “young Americans of high ability to study for a degree in the United Kingdom,” according to its website.

The candidates are selected based on academic merit, leadership potential and ambassadorial potential, which are all weighted equally. To be eligible, candidates must have maintained a minimum GPA of 3.7.

Dorison was a concentrator in the Wilson School and studied in Oxford during his time at Princeton.

“I loved studying abroad at Oxford, and I’m very excited to return to the United Kingdom,” he said in an email. Dorison plans to use the scholarship to pursue two one-year master’s programs in human rights and international security at Oxford.

“I want to study how the international community can make the world more secure while simultaneously promoting human rights,” he said.

Dorison said he was “in complete shock” when he received a phone call with the news from the Marshall Commission.

“I don’t think it’s completely sunk in yet,” he said. “It’s an honor to be selected alongside the recipients from Princeton and other universities.”

Meanwhile, Edwards, who is a concentrator in the Wilson School, will be using the scholarship to pursue a DPhil. in public health at Oxford, which will be jointly supervised by the Centre for Health, Law and Emerging Technologies and the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics.

These pursuits will enable her to further foster the interests she has pursued at the University.

“As my past academic work and my thesis focus on a comparative study between the regulation of assisted reproductive technologies in the United States and the United Kingdom and many of the leaders in bioethics broadly and reproductive bioethics specifically are professors at British universities, the Marshall seemed like it would be a great fit,” she said.

The award came as a total surprise, Edwards said in an email.

“When I got a call from the [British] Consulate in Los Angeles it actually sounded like a rejection call at first. She said something like, ‘Thanks so much for coming out, we had a large number of great candidates ... ’ so I was preparing myself for a letdown when I heard her say that I got it,” she said. “I was just very shocked, humbled and mainly excited for the opportunity.”