Out of a pool of more than 11,000 national applicants, Trinity senior Dean Moyar was awarded the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship.
Moyar, who hails from Cleveland, Ohio, has been named one of 85 recipients of the national award, which subsidizes graduate studies leading to a Ph.D. in humanistic studies.
"This is an extremely competitive and prestigious award", said Ellen Wittig, associate dean of Trinity College.
The fellowship will cover Moyar's tuition and fees, as well as provide a stipend of $12,750 for his first year of study at any graduate school in the United States or Canada.
Moyer plans to enter the Ph.D. program at the University of Chicago's committee on social thought. The committee is a collection of professors in political science, philosophy, literature, sociology and religion who combine different aspects of human sciences.
Falling in line with the fellowship's focus on the humanities, the two most recent University graduates to have won the award, Leigh Edwards and Steven Newman, were both English majors.
Moyar, however, is a physics and philosophy major who also won the Barry Goldwater Scholarship in physics.
After winning the Mellon Fellowship, Moyer was praised profusely by peers and professors alike.
"I had Dean in ancient philosophy. His exam was extraordinary--I hadn't seen anything like it in years. As a freshman he was miles ahead of everybody in the class," said Edward Mahoney, professor of philosophy.
"Dean has a real analytic analysis and he gets right to the heart of the matter," said Owen Flanagan, professor of philosophy.
"I love his politics--they're much more conservative than mine. There's nothing flippant about him," Flanagan said.
Trinity senior Pete Cha, a brother of Moyar's in Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity, also praised Moyar's intellectual abilities. "He's probably the smartest guy who we all know who goes out a lot, and has very good social skills with the opposite sex and among his peers," Cha said.
"At meetings, when he talks, the room's silent--everyone's dying to hear. When he talks he doesn't waste a word," said Trinity freshman Dan Leehman, a member of SAE.
Although he sported a 4.0 GPA through his junior year and is ranked third in his class, Moyar's college years have not been entirely spent tooling away in the library.
Moyar is a member of the greek life task force, a tutor of local high school students, a former president of SAE, an associate editor of Eruditio and a former Chronicle columnist.
"I was sort of the black sheep of my family, since my brothers went to Harvard and Yale," Moyar said. "I was never serious about academia, the majority of my time is not spent doing work or something constructive. Most of my time is spent with my friends."
Although Moyar said he found his friendships the most important part of his college experience, he thought it was important to maintain a distance in his friendships allowing him to be serious with his academics.
"I think he would make a very good academic. He'd be committed to his students and to actually making contributions to philosophy and to his field," Mahoney said.
Moyar's other awards and honors include membership in Phi Beta Kappa, the Jones-Laurence Award, the Dannenberg Prize/Fellowship and the Barry Goldwater Scholarship in physics.
Moyar said the most intellectually exciting subject to him is the study of history, in particular, intellectual history.
Applicants for the Mellon fellowship are nominated by faculty or can apply directly. Students submit their GRE scores and transcripts and are interviewed.
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