UNC Rhodes scholars chosen for USA Today's first team

Aisha Saad

Rhodes Scholarship winners Aisha Ihab Saad and Elisabeth “Lisette” Yorke of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have been selected as members of USA Today‘s 2009 All-USA College Academic First Team.

Saad is majoring in environmental health sciences in the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health and in Spanish, in the College of Arts and Sciences.

Saad and Yorke were two of 20 undergraduates chosen by a panel of judges from among hundreds of college juniors and seniors. Each will receive a $2,500 cash award. The winners, called “the nation’s most gifted college students,” were announced in today’s (April 29) issue of USA Today in a story available online. Yorke is pictured on the paper’s front page.

Only one other North Carolina school – Wake Forest University – had a student in the top 20; the only other schools with two scholars in the group were the U.S. Naval Academy and Yale. The annual award program, now in its 20th year, honors full-time undergraduate students with exceptional academic and extracurricular accomplishments.

The most important selection criterion for the awards is the student’s essay describing his or her most outstanding intellectual endeavor during college. Grades, academic rigor, leadership and activities also are considered. Winners must excel both on and off campus.

Saad, a senior from Cary, N.C., has interned with government ministries in Peru and in the blood diseases ward of Cairo University’s Teaching Hospitals, experiences funded by her Morehead-Cain Scholarship to UNC-Chapel Hill. She will graduate May 10 as a public service scholar – a student who has performed at least 300 hours of public service while at Carolina.

Yorke, of Hillside Boularderie, Nova Scotia, is also a Morehead-Cain Scholar. She is a senior biology major in the College of Arts and Sciences.

More information about Saad is available online, as is additional information on Yorke.

Both students will head to Oxford University in England on Rhodes Scholarships this fall.

UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health contact: Ramona DuBose, director of communications, (919) 966-7467 or ramona_dubose@unc.edu.