A school-high group of seniors will travel to the University of Oxford as recipients of one of the most prestigious awards in higher education--the Rhodes Scholarship.
A selection committee announced Saturday night that Alexis Blane, Pavan Cheruvu and Samuel Malone are the University's 31st, 32nd and 33rd Rhodes scholars.
"This is unprecedented for Duke and a very exciting moment," said history professor Peter Wood, who chairs Duke's Rhodes Advisory Committee. "These are three unique individuals with remarkable track records and exciting potential.... They interviewed more than 900 people, so it's obviously a very large pool and quite impressive for any single university to have this many in a year."
Duke's total of three scholars matched the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, and is second only to Harvard University, at which five Rhodes scholars were named.
Blane, a Charlotte native, is a double major in English and biology. She said that as an Angier B. Duke scholar she had the opportunity to study at Oxford and that prompted her interest in extended study there.
"Being over there really whet my appetite and convinced me it was a place I wanted to go again," she said.
At Oxford, she plans to study English literature from 1880 to the present. Currently, she is writing an honors thesis about contemporary literature.
Blane helped start The Duke Mind, an undergraduate journal in the cognitive sciences, and has also served as two-year editor of The Archive, an undergraduate literary journal.
She practices karate, has been president of the volleyball club and is a member of the Undergraduate Judicial Board and the Honor Council. She is a member of Phi Beta Kappa, an academic honor society, and researched Alzheimer's disease as a Howard Hughes research fellow.
Cheruvu, a Tampa, Fla., native, is a triple major in biomedical engineering, electrical engineering and chemistry with a 4.0 grade point average.
"I was looking back at my transcript of courses, and I'd felt I'd taken a lot of courses between engineering and chemistry, but what I was missing was a focus," Cheruvu said.
Cheruvu hopes to find that focus at Oxford, where he will study cardiac biosensing, applying biomedical technology to studying and predicting heart disease. He has worked on research at Duke with artificial hearts and cardiac device models.
At Duke, Cheruvu is president of Tau Beta Pi, the engineering honor society. He also spent a summer in southern India, where he organized a prevention campaign for sexually transmitted diseases. Cheruvu is the senior editor of Eruditio, an undergraduate publication, an organizer of the cricket team and has served as a patient advocate in Duke Hospital's neurosurgery ward.
Malone, of Zebulon, N.C., is a double major in mathematics and economics.
"I went to Oxford the summer after my sophomore year," Malone said. "While I was there, I studied Victorian literature. I really fell in love with the beauty of the Oxford campus, the city of Oxford itself and the intellectual environment there."
He has edited Vertices, an undergraduate journal of science and technology, and recently won first place in an international mathematical contest in modeling. At Oxford, he plans to pursue a M.Phil. in economics through the Oxford Financial Research Centre.
All three, like many of the University's previous Rhodes scholars, are A.B. Duke scholars as well.
"[A.B. Dukes] represent the very best students coming in to the freshman class, and obviously there are changes, these things are always hard to predict, [but] you would assume if they are in the top cohort coming in, they are in the top cohort coming out," Wood said.
The 32 U.S. scholars were among 925 applicants at 319 universities throughout the country. Rhodes scholarships were created in 1902 by British philanthropist Cecil Rhodes and provide two or three years of study at Oxford. Winners are selected on the basis of high academic achievement, personal integrity, leadership potential and physical vigor.
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