Two Rhodes Scholars hail from Roseville

Rhodes Scholars Priya Sury (courtesy University of Minnesota) and Prerna Nadathur (courtesy University of Chicago)

Thirty-two Rhodes Scholars are selected each year to represent the United States - and this year two of them are from Roseville (I'm no Rhodes Scholar, but my cell phone calculator tells me that's 6.25 percent of the total.) They are Prerna Nadathur and Priya M. Sury.

Their bios from the Rhodes Scholarship site:

Prerna Nadathur, Roseville, is a senior at the University of Chicago where she majors in

mathematics and minors in linguistics and philosophy. She writes poetry and fiction, plays

violin in the University chamber orchestra, performs classical Indian dance, and has won

prizes for her piano performances. Prerna has also been a leader in student government and

in social justice activities, and founded a chapter of Students for a Democratic Society. She

has done independent research on social choice theorems, set theory and homology. At

Oxford, Prerna will do the M.Phil. in general linguistics and comparative philology.

Priya M. Sury, Roseville, graduated from Washington University in St. Louis in May, summa

cum laude, in anthropology and Spanish. She is currently studying for an M.D. degree at the

University of Minnesota. At Washington University, she was the first student ever chosen for

all three of its most selective merit scholarships. Priya has done anthropological work on the

use of yoga in western medicine, and been a research intern at the Mayo Clinic in biomedical

imaging and ovarian cancer. She has also done research on adolescent suicide in the

Dominican Republic. She has studied in Chile and Mexico, worked on an HIV/AIDS

educational initiative and as a tutor for underprivileged Hispanic students. Priya plans to do

the M.Phil. in medical anthropology at Oxford.

Rhodes Scholarships provide all expenses for one to three years of study at the University of Oxford in England. The Rhodes Scholarship, established in 1902, is the oldest international scholarship. Sury is the sixth University of Minnesota-Twin Cities student to receive a Rhodes Scholarship since 2001.

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