Two ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College seniors who seek healing and justice for others inspired by personal journeys, one from physical pain, another from the pain of dislocation from beloved land, have been awarded Thomas J. Watson Fellowships to pursue globally focused projects in 2023–24.

Traveling to 12 countries on five continents to pursue their projects, Elizabeth LaCroix ’23 of Richmond, R.I., and Adilene Sandoval ’23 of Mattawa, Wash., for international travel and exploration in 2023–24.

A double major in English and chemistry, LaCroix will travel to Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Ecuador, China, and India for her project, “The Global Story of Menstrual Pain.�

Drawing from her own personal experiences, she will collect stories on the subject of menstrual pain from patients, doctors, and researchers to create a global perspective on the issue.

A double major in sociology and environmental studies, Sandoval will draw on her Mexican-Indigenous heritage for her project, “Weaving Together Activism and Healing.�

Traveling to Australia, Italy, Ethiopia, El Salvador, Colombia, and Guatemala, she will learn about various effective approaches, all focused on place, people, and justice, that instill healing and well-being for communities that have faced the social, institutional, and cultural violence of colonization.

“Both of these Watson projects face outward to the world and its peoples, seeking to learn from the ways diverse cultures are caring for their bodily pain and healing their colonial trauma,â€� says Robert Strong, a lecturer in English and director of national fellowships for ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½. “Both of these new Fellows are unflinching in confronting the suffering that exists in this world — as well as the systems that fail to care for it — and in engaging directly with the very people working toward their own healing.â€�

Elizabeth LaCroix

Since she began menstruating, LaCroix has dealt with extreme pain during her period. “I would wake up in the middle of the night to unbearable pain coursing through my body,� she recalls. After graduating from high school, she started taking hormonal birth control, a common medical approach to treating patients with period-related challenges, including pain. Finally, she felt normal, “and it was this sense of normalcy that made me realize my pain wasn’t normal, no matter how common it was.�

Pain defines the human condition, yet each person’s pain is deeply personal, a truism that LaCroix learned while volunteering at Maine Family Planning in Lewiston. There, she met a patient who, like LaCroix, also experienced severe menstrual pain. LaCroix initially felt kinship, but “thinking of our shared experiences also led me to focus on our differences,� she says. “We were not one and the same; I could never know or understand her pain.� For LaCroix, it was an epiphany. “If no one experiences menstrual pain the same, then there should be multiple ways of treating it.�

To bring greater understanding of this complexity during her Watson year, LaCroix will use story-gathering skills she honed as an English major and as a staff member of The ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Student, including a stint as managing news editor when she was a junior. “I believe the menstrual pain field is missing the human connection, and the stories of all involved can heal the gaping wounds of miscommunication between patients, doctors, and researchers,â€� she says.

In India, she’ll learn more about medicinal yoga, or chikitsa, with Tilottama Patil, founder of Aakar Yog Chikitsa Institute in Pune. In the Netherlands, she will interview Tinde van Andel, an ethnopharmacologist at the University of Leiden who studies the traditional use of plants for medicinal and other purposes. In Ecuador, LaCroix will learn about traditional Andean medicine integrated into modern approaches.

At ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, LaCroix is a dean’s list student and a four-year member of the cross country and track and field teams, serving as a cross country captain this year, and has been a leader of Fem STEM, supporting female-identifying students interested in STEM. LaCroix plans to pursue a Ph.D. in chemistry and a career in medicinal chemistry. Looking ahead, she already knows one thing for sure, “mentoring young scientists, especially women and those from underrepresented groups in science, will be a huge part of my future career.â€�

Adilene Sandoval

At age 8, Sandoval and her family left the mountains of Michoacán, Mexico, and moved to the U.S. in search of a better life. In Mexico, she recalls, life revolved around her family and the land, whether she was helping her father fish for river crabs — chacales — or growing roses and medicinal herbs with her mother. 

“It was a sacred cycle nurtured through generations of land stewards who passed down their teachings to my father, who then passed them on to me,� she says.

Settling in Washington state, Sandoval and her family worked in industrial agriculture, harvesting apples, cherries, asparagus, and peaches. The symbiotic conversation between Sandoval and the earth was muted. “People were not seen as stewards of the land but rather as a labor force.� That dynamic “leaves you mentally, physically, and emotionally depleted and disconnected.�

After graduating from high school, Sandoval headed to ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, deeply mindful of her family’s and home community’s resilience. In addition to her studies, she is an active member of Raices Unidas, a digital marketing assistant for the Center for Purposeful Work, and a student ambassador for first-generation students through the college’s Bobcat First program.

Last summer, Sandoval received an Otis Fellowship to study land stewardship, agriculture, and migration in Oaxaca, Mexico. She recalls watching a group of women there work on tapestries using earth-tone threads, dyed using plants and stones. Those fine threads helped weave together a picture for her of “ecological and social well-being,� where “repair of ecosystem services contributed to cultural revitalization, and renewal of culture promoted the restoration of social and environmental wellbeing.�

During her Watson year, Sandoval will seek to deepen and extend her understanding of the concept of community healing that she’d seen in Oaxaca, by volunteering and speaking with community members, organizers, healers, academics, writers, and psychologists in six countries.

“I will be able to explore the spectrum in which justice-oriented healing is occurring and how that could be implemented in our communities, institutions, and systems,” she says.

Sandoval will seek ideas across six countries and five continents, from sovereignty and intergenerational healing within Aboriginal peoples of Australia to the role of community cultural wealth in facilitating healing from displacement in Black immigrant communities in Italy.

After her Watson year, Sandoval plans to pursue a Ph.D. in counseling psychology and begin a career in action-oriented research and counseling.

The Thomas J. Wat­son Fel­low­ship is a one-year grant for pur­pose­ful, inde­pen­dent explo­ration out­side the U.S., award­ed to grad­u­at­ing seniors nom­i­nat­ed by one of 41 part­ner insti­tu­tions. Watson fellows conceive original projects, deciding on their own where to go, who to meet and when to change course, producing a year of personal insight, perspective and confidence that shapes the arc of fellows’ lives. Started in 1968, Watson Fellows comprise leaders in every field. The one-year stipend is $40,000.

Hannah McKenzie ’21 has received a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, a prestigious grant that supports a year of international exploration for graduating U.S. college seniors.

During her year abroad, McKenzie plans to travel to South Africa, Uganda, Greece, and Switzerland to meet and talk with refugees about their traditional foods, their markets and restaurants, and how they are working to sustain themselves. She is interested in learning about self-organization, the ways that people draw on resources and strategies from within their own communities to lift their people up. 

An anthropology major from the Maryland town of Stevenson, in Baltimore County, McKenzie is among for 2021. Each Watson Fellow will receive $36,000 for 12 months of travel and college loan assistance, as applicable.

As she concludes her ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ education, McKenzie is at a crossroads of sorts, and the 

Her academic path as an anthropology major has taught McKenzie to be leery of traditional humanitarian efforts that “frame the communities they serve as passive, or that impose approaches that don’t fit the local cultural context,� she explains.

McKenzie’s other path as a ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ student, deep community engagement with Lewiston’s vibrant immigrant communities as well as extensive off-campus study experiences, reflects her growing desire to learn and to help internationally.

“Anthropology taught Hannah what not to do but she feels that she is still in the dark about how to be a good humanitarian,� explains Associate Professor of Politics Senem Aslan, a member of the Watson Committee that nominated McKenzie for her award.

“I want to grapple with the questions about what kind of humanitarian I can be, and how to merge the sensitivities I’ve learned from anthropology and community-engaged work here with my hope to help people who are struggling.�

Dana Professor of Anthropology Loring Danforth is advising McKenzie’s community-engaged honors thesis, in which she is exploring the work of people on the front lines of addressing violence against women in Lewiston’s African immigrant communities.

He’s seen her wrestle with issues that swirl around her academic work.

Danforth recalls how McKenzie, in one of her papers, analyzed attitudes toward homosexuality, including homophobia, among asylum seekers from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Angola living in Lewiston. 

“Hannah struggled admirably with the conflict between her anthropological commitment to cultural relativism, on the one hand, and her commitment to some kind of global moral minimum,� says Danforth, adding that he could recommend “no other student in my 40 years of teaching more highly or with greater confidence.�

As McKenzie wrote in that paper, “We are all learning, debating, and wading in global cultural flows — even just within the small city of Lewiston.�

McKenzie first encountered Lewiston’s international community while visiting ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ as a prospective student. Since then her engagement has deepened and broadened.

She’s been an English-language teacher for four years at Immigrant Resource Center of Maine and a French-language interpreter for asylum seekers, immigrants, and refugees at the Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project, where she was a Harward Center Summer Civic Fellow in 2020. 

In 2019, she and classmate Julia Nash received a Phillips Fellowship from ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ to fund a project based in Nepal, living with a Tibetan refugee family and interviewing women at a community carpet factory. For four years, she’s been a Bonner Leader, joining other students who do community-engaged work and “grapple with their own questions of doing community work in a way that is meaningful and effective.â€�

Through Lewiston’s Center for Wisdom’s Women, she established a new discussion group for French-speaking women, both newly arrived francophone asylum seekers and older French Canadian citizens. 

ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ multimedia producer Theophil Syslo interviewed McKenzie recently, and here’s an edited selection of what she had to say.

How has your study of anthropology informed your Watson project?

Anthropology is sometimes talked about as the handmaiden of colonialism. It has a horribly oppressive history, in certain parts at least. 

Because of that history, people in anthropology, including at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, are grappling with that history in direct and necessary ways. They are trying to figure out how to engage with people in a way that is ethical and sensitive.

What attracts you to the Watson?

I’m definitely someone who could make a five- or 10-year plan for my life — and, in fact, I would probably take a lot of comfort in that. 

But the Watson allows me to follow those curiosities, rather than to suppress them in order to be decisive about my next steps. I don’t necessarily have such a straightforward path after I graduate. I am allowed to not have all of the answers yet.

In that way, the beauty of the Watson is almost unfathomable: I get to spend this year thinking deeply about my questions about what kind of person I want to be in the world. 

It’s an open and liberating opportunity for me to explore what’s on my mind at this moment in my life, in the most fundamental way.

How would you describe the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ support you received during the application process?

The ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ faculty helped me get in touch with where I am at this moment in my life in a way that has been extremely fulfilling and exciting. They supported me in a huge way and I’m very grateful for that.

Watson Fellowship winner Hannah McKenzie ’21 describes the guidance provided by the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ faculty during the fellowship application process.

The Watson Committee made it possible for you to work with a mentor of sorts, ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Watson alumna, Erica Veazey ’16. How did that work out?

During the process, Erica encouraged me to allow myself to fully dive into the idea of the project being about the confusions I’m feeling in my life. She showed me how that’s something Watson supports. That was extremely liberating.

In your application, you describe visiting Lewiston during your college search and visiting a food store in Lewiston owned by an immigrant from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. How and why did that visit make such a deep impression on you, in terms of your college search and deciding ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ was right for you?

After my campus tour, my mom and I went downtown. We were wandering Lisbon street and went into this Congolese-run food shop. We talked to the owner about the foods he was making and what he thought of Lewiston, what his experience had been. That conversation really stuck with me.

When I was choosing a college, I was thinking about social justice and location. Growing up around Baltimore, so much of what I had learned already about social justice issues and history and politics was shaped by the local reality — a complicated history and the many inequalities that form the city.

When I was in that food shop, I realized that Lewiston would introduce me to new questions of life in an American city and about social justice. I was just really drawn to it for that reason.

Has your interest in food brought you into contact with local farmers of immigrant communities, such as? 

Last year I was taking an economic anthropology course with Professor Eames. We worked with members of the . My role was to research goat-slaughter regulations in the state of Maine, so that they could prepare to expand their farm to provide for their communities. That was a really cool project.

Last thoughts?

Just going through the process was fulfilling. Then to actually receive it — that was a dream come true, not to be cheesy.

The opportunity to think about questions that are most exciting and meaningful to me, and especially after a year that’s been so confining and difficult in many ways, and to have the world open up in such an extreme way — I can’t express how grateful I am.

Two Alaskans are ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½’ 2016 recipients of the Watson Fellowship, a prestigious grant that supports a year of international exploration for graduating college seniors.

Kelsey Schober of Sutton expects to spend her Watson year in the Netherlands, South Africa, Arctic Canada, and Chile.

There, she hopes to investigate “social circus”: the use of circus arts to help vulnerable or at-risk communities change self-perceptions, build relationships, and learn to access opportunities.

Erica “Jaqui” Veazey of Fairbanks, meanwhile, will be in Sweden, Ethiopia, Armenia, and Australia.

She’ll study perceptions and treatments of depression in nations with very different cultural, medical and institutional approaches to the illness.

The pair are among 40 Watson awardees across the nation for 2016. Each Watson Fellow will receive $30,000 for 12 months of travel, college loan assistance as applicable, and a health insurance allowance.

+Kelsey Schober '16

Kelsey Schober ’16 of Sutton, Alaska, is one of ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½’ two 2016 Watson Fellows. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

+Erica Veazey '16

Watson Fellow Erica Veazey ’16 hails from Fairbanks, Alaska. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

Environmental major and Watson Fellow Caroline Caldwell ’15 of Gambier, Ohio, poses with a friendly lamb at Nezinscot Farm in Turner, Maine. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

As a young teenager, Caroline Caldwell ’15 lit out for a two-week New Mexico training camp to complete her skill set for the sport called the modern pentathlon.

Already competitive in horseback riding, swimming and running, three of the five stages of modern pentathlon, she wanted to round out her repertoire by learning to shoot and to fence.

It was a big hop, geographically and psychologically, to Roswell from the family farm in Gambier, Ohio. “I was like, ‘What am I doing?’ ” Caldwell says. “It was really hard for that first week.”

But then came the payoff. “I remember finishing the camp and continuing into nationals and thinking, ‘This is awesome,'” she continues. “That sparked my desire to keep throwing myself into situations where I’m going to fly somewhere and not know anyone, and live with them and work with them.”

Caldwell will be doing exactly that later this year, thanks to the coveted Watson Fellowship, an award that supports a year of study and research abroad. This environmental studies major is one of 50 U.S. students to receive the $30,000 stipend in 2015.

Caroline Caldwell at Zapata Ranch, in Colorado, during her 2014 internship.

For her Watson year, Caldwell will undertake an exploration of sustainable livestock ranching in Australia, Finland and Tristan da Cunha, the namesake island of the world’s most remote inhabited archipelago.

“I’m trying to learn more about sustainable management in places where it’s about survival more than keeping up with a fad,” says Caldwell, who from an early age was responsible for a collection of animals on the farm in Gambier.

In all three nations, rigorous agricultural management is essential. Australia, the land of livestock “stations” or ranches that can rival small countries for size, is dry and getting drier as the climate changes. Finland presents all the agricultural challenges of a far northern land.

Grazing on Tristan, whose land is held communally by the entire population, is limited by the availability of suitable pastureland and a culture that emphasizes income equality.

The livestock operations that she’ll visit during her Watson year, Caldwell explains, employ practices informed by ecological knowledge handed down over generations. Those operations must be self-sufficient, because their locations present few economic or environmental alternatives.

“There isn’t really a fallback plan for them,” she says. “These farms and ranches operate in stark contrast to America’s wealthy subsidized farms that have modern high-tech machinery and a powerful economic status as massive cattle exporters.

“I want to explore how sustainability is inherent in each community’s culture, and how they have adjusted to political and economic influences within the bounds of their natural environments.”

Watson Fellow Caroline Caldwell ’15 greets a goat at Nezinscot Farm. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

Caldwell’s Watson plan reads like a blueprint of her personality and passions. It’s a blueprint that she refined and polished at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½. For her, ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ was the place to find focus and fresh challenges for a robust energy, a love of the outdoors and a voracious appetite for new skills, the more hands-on the better.

Whether it’s wielding a chainsaw, tending to livestock wounds or learning to sew (thanks to the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ theater course “Pattern Drafting and Draping”), Caldwell says that she just loves “physically being able to replicate what other people can do.”

Caldwell developed her capacity for hard work on the family farm, which her parents ran in addition to day jobs in education. (They now operate the college farm at Kenyon.) As she notes in her Watson proposal, “At age 7 I could show you the difference between new soybean and corn sprouts, and by 14 I could look at any hay bale and identify the various grass types packed into the bale.”)

At ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, Caldwell started out with the swim team and gravitated to rowing. “Rowing has really shaped me as a person,” she says. “Whenever I feel like I can’t do something any longer, if I’m exhausted or mentally burned out, I think back to rowing practice — ‘Well, if I could get through that, then I can get through this.'”

Caldwell’s Watson itinerary reflects her ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ journey. For her senior thesis, with Holly Ewing as adviser, she looked at land preservation organizations in Maine, Maryland and Ohio. Her study-abroad experience in the Turks and Caicos Islands whetted her interest in the challenges of island life.

And Caldwell’s Otis Fellowship, a ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ grant supporting off-campus research with an environmental theme, enabled her to undertake a three-month internship, in spring 2014, at The Nature Conservancy’s Zapata Ranch in Colorado.

Watson Fellow Caroline Caldwell ’15 at Nezinscot Farm in Turner, Maine. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

The 103,000-acre ranch supports some 3,000 bison and 300 cattle in an environment where strict management of water use and grazing is crucial. “A lot of the cottonwoods around the ranch were dying,” she says, “because the water table has dropped so much.”

The internship “introduced me to large-scale ranching and the success that comes from managing entire ecosystems instead of focusing separately on the crops or livestock,” Caldwell explains. The experience was eye-opening after life on an Ohio farm where the land is fertile and rainwater plentiful.

“I felt Zapata Ranch was the beginning of my life in sustainable ranching, and I realized how much more I want to learn.”

Caldwell readily credits ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ for helping prepare her, in ways both specific and broad, for both the Watson experience and what comes next. Like many ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ seniors whose work with fellowship advisers (in her case, Nancy Kleckner, biologist and ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½’ Watson liaison, and Robert Strong, lecturer in English and the college’s graduate fellowship adviser) has paid off with an award, Caldwell feels that guidance was decisive.

On the broad scale, Caldwell could write the theme song for the liberal arts experience. “The fact that there are opportunities to explore almost any interest is just phenomenal. I think coming here and taking that leap of faith has led to so many other opportunities.”

She adds, “I’m going to look back to my ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ experience for a lot of inner strength because it has pushed me in ways that I didn’t think possible.” Coming from Caroline Caldwell, that’s saying a lot.

Two ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College seniors are among this year’s 43 recipients of a Watson Fellowship, a prestigious grant that supports a year of travel and research outside the United States.

ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ seniors Simone Schriger and Brian Kennedy are recipients of 2014 Watson Fellowships. (Sarah Crosby/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

Brian Kennedy, an economics major from Port Washington, N.Y., will travel to Japan, Australia, Ireland and Canada to study commercial production of marine algae and its potential for revitalizing coastal economies in the United States.

• Read more about Brian Kennedy’s plans for his Watson year.

Simone Schriger, a psychology major from Los Angeles, will study the implications of the trade in human body parts, such as blood and hair, in India, South Africa and Costa Rica.

• Read more about Simone Schriger’s plans for her Watson year.

A program of the Thomas J. Watson Foundation, the Watson Fellowship supports a year of international exploration in any field for graduating college seniors “of unusual promise.” Each fellow is awarded $28,000 for 12 months of travel as well as college loan assistance as applicable and an insurance allowance.

Recipients come from select private liberal arts colleges and universities across the U.S. This year’s 43 recipients were selected from a pool of nearly 700 candidates overall and 150 finalists.

Growing up along the North Shore of Long Island, Kennedy says, “it’s hard not to interact with seaweed — definitely my first experience with seaweed was probably just throwing it at my siblings.â€�

But through his ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ studies and other experiences, including a 2013 internship with Maine’s marine algae and aquaculture industries, he developed a fascination with the broad potential of seaweed and other algaes in food and fuel production.

“What fascinates me in economics is the interface between industry and natural resources,� he says.

Schriger plans to research the practice of donating human body parts and products: specifically, breast milk, hair, blood and kidneys. She will travel to India, South Africa and Costa Rica to understand differing motivations for “parting with one’s parts� and the cultural contexts that affect those motivations.

In her interviews with people involved in myriad ways with corporeal donations, she will also investigate attitudes toward the commodification of these goods. “There’s a global network of these parts,â€� she says.

“One of the things that I’m trying to figure out is how that has changed and how much our view of it, as something that’s pretty normal, is representative of others’ understanding of it in different nations and cultures.â€�

Both Kennedy and Schriger credit their time at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ as key to their success at competing for the Watson.

Guidance from psychology faculty was crucial in helping prepare Schriger for a successful Watson application. “The individual attention they provided was instrumental in developing confidence and independent working habits,� Schriger says.

Kennedy found that feedback and support from the Watson Fellowship Committee at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ was invaluable as he honed his application. And, he adds, “One thing that ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ really has taught me to do is to just take my own initiative and go with that.

“It’s so easy to get to know the professors and other people who can help you make something happen.�

Ingrid Olivia Norrmén-Smith ’13. Photograph by Michael Bradley/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College.

A 2013 Watson Fellowship will make it possible for a ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ alumna to spend a year in Africa and Asia researching cultural perceptions of one of humankind’s leading causes of death and disability.

A double major in neuroscience and French who graduates in May, Ingrid Norrmén-Smith of Upper Montclair, N.J., has received the Watson to support research that will explore how people in Morocco, Madagascar and Cambodia regard strokes and stroke victims.

“Stroke is a leading cause of death and disability around the world, but there isn’t a lot of literature regarding how different cultures perceive it” — even though a better understanding of such cultural perceptions could mitigate the global impact of strokes, says Norrmén-Smith, who goes by her middle name, Olivia.

“Your brain is an incredible organ that defines you, and when you have an affront to that organ, so much is changed. The effects are so personal — how people deal with disability, trauma and concepts of self, all of these different things.”

She adds, “I believe that as a Westerner, I stand to learn something valuable about how stroke victims are treated elsewhere. It may be that victims in other cultures are respected and revered, not stigmatized, and that life post-stroke is more fruitful because the support system that exists is more robust.

“I am just so happy that the Watson Foundation recognized this project.”

Awarded only to graduates of 40 highly selective liberal arts colleges, the Watson is one of the nation’s most prestigious graduate fellowships. The $25,000 fellowship is designed to identify potential leaders and challenge them in ways that foster independence, a global perspective and adaptability to new cultures. It funds research on a topic deeply important to the recipient and is conducted outside academe and the recipient’s home culture. .

“My project has two components,” says Norrmén-Smith. “One is to discern on a grand scale how stroke is perceived, and that will be accomplished via a questionnaire” completed by ordinary citizens in the destination country.

“But then I will also have personal interviews with stroke patients or people close to them.”

Norrmén-Smith has reached out to leading researchers in each country for assistance in finding stroke patients to interview and in administering the questionnaires. The questionnaires will combine basic demographic questions with scenarios depicting people afflicted in different ways by a stroke — physical, emotional and mental.

“It will be fascinating to see if disparate deficits evoke different responses,” she says. In addition, she will ask how participants would feel if a family member was experiencing stroke symptoms and what interventions the participant would take.

“Those could include options such as seeking medical help or religious advice, or whether the participant would intervene socially, pursue an exorcism, not seek help, etc.”

Although the cultures of Morocco, Madagascar and Cambodia differ in many ways, Norrmén-Smith suspects that religion will be a prime factor in shaping perceptions of stroke. She takes her lead from research into cross-cultural perceptions of mental illness that points to religion as a major determinant.

Morocco is predominantly Muslim, Cambodia primarily Buddhist and Madagascar is roughly divided between Christianity and faith practices indigenous to the island. But despite her expectations about religion’s role, “who knows what I will find?” Norrmén-Smith says. “That’s what’s intriguing.”

Norrmén-Smith first became interested in stroke while working as a volunteer and intern in New Jersey hospitals during the past several years. At the Overlook Medical Center in Summit, she conducted surveys of stroke patients and attended stroke-support group sessions.

She parlayed this experience into a project for the trauma hospital at University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, in Newark, where she created a stroke awareness brochure that has been adopted by the neurology department and disseminated through the city’s medical establishment.

At ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, Norrmén-Smith may be better known for her stage presence than her neuroscience research. She has sung with a variety of campus bands, including the a cappella , and has also acted in plays.

“It’s the nature of a ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ student to be doing things that he or she is passionate about and to be overcommitted — in a good way,” she says. “People are really involved with things. I think ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ is a very happy place and that has influenced my experiences here.”

A ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ senior from Athens, Greece, is one of 40 students across the country to receive a 2012 Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, a prestigious grant that supports a year of independent research abroad.

Romina Istratii, who graduates from ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ in May, will use the award to travel to Senegal, Ghana, Ethiopia and Rwanda to research the dynamics of food security, gender bias and the role of women in farming.

The Watson is designed to identify potential leaders and challenge them in ways that foster independence, a global perspective and adaptability to new cultures. It funds research that’s on a topic deeply important to the recipient and is conducted outside academe and the recipient’s home culture.

Video: Romina Istratii ’12 at the Mount David Society Scholarship Luncheon, March 30, 2012:
http://vimeo.com/39840342

Istratii belongs to the 44th class of Watson recipients, drawn from 15 states and seven countries and planning research in 74 countries. Fellows receive $25,000 for 12 months of travel, college loan assistance as needed and an insurance allowance.

Istratii’s research proposal is titled “Meeting the ‘Voiceless’: Understanding How Women Can Transform Food Insecurity in sub-Saharan Africa.” Although women far outnumber men as farm workers in many African countries, gender bias and male dominance of economic and societal institutions constrain women farmers’ opportunities for advancement.

“This situation contributes to persistent food insecurity,” Istratii writes in her Watson proposal. At the same time, while existing research demonstrates the role of gender bias in putting women farmers at a disadvantage, the voices of such women are all but absent in that research, a void that Istratii hopes to address.

She will interview women farmers, academic experts and women’s rights activists. “I am intrigued to hear African women narrate their own stories and share their own perspectives,” she writes.
“The literature shows that women are crucial to food stability, but it fails to project what women think and how they see their role as forces of security and economic growth.

“Do women consider themselves equal to men? Do they feel that more egalitarian circumstances on the farm could increase the welfare of the household and the community more broadly? Do they associate their personal circumstances with food insecurity? What would they say to their governments and the extension agents that work to empower them?”

Istratii selected her destinations on the basis of unique characteristics that will inform her career objective of ameliorating food insecurity in Africa. In Senegal, she will live with a village mayor who will introduce her to the region and to female farmers, and will visit a U.S. Agency for International Development project that aims to increase female producers’ access to markets.

Next stop is Ghana, where female voices are conspicuously absent from the masses of research into food insecurity, and where members of the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ economics faculty have been able to connect her with valuable interviewees.

In Ethiopia, Istratii will study agricultural practices in the relatively egalitarian context of the Oromo people, the nation’s single largest ethnic group. In addition to female farmers, she will interview civil rights activists, women’s empowerment organizations and journalists.

Her last stop is Rwanda, where women have been instrumental in rebuilding the country after the 1994 genocide, and where important reforms that empower women have recently been enacted. Those reforms, Istratii believes, “will have tremendous implications for food insecurity and must be studied while they are still under implementation.”

Romina Istratii of Athens, Greece, shown here speaking during the October 2012 dedication of two academic buildings at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College, is a ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ senior recently awarded the prestigious Watson Fellowship. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College.

Born in Moldova, Istratii immigrated to Greece at age 4. Experiencing poverty early on, her response then and now has been to seek ways to make things better on a community scale. At ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, she says, she found not only a responsive forum for her ideas but a community that encouraged action.

“Excellent knowledge, supreme leadership skills and bright minds might provide the world with better ideas,” she says, “but only true personal engagement with other peoples’ problems can provide the world with forces of change.”

As head of the Committee on Women’s Rights for the Model United Nations at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, Istratii first learned of the barriers confronting women farmers in Africa. Participating in research by ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ and University of Tennessee economists, and supported by a Stangle Family Fund Grant for Research in Economics and Law from ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, she laid the groundwork for the Watson project.

Istratii is a triple major in economics, politics and Chinese. Along with Chinese, English and her native languages of Greek and Moldovan, she also speaks French.

The Thomas J. Watson Foundation was created in 1961 as a charitable trust by Mrs. Thomas J. Watson Sr. in honor of her late husband, the founder of International Business Machines (IBM). In 1968, in recognition of their parents’ longstanding interest in education and world affairs, their children decided that the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship Program should constitute a major activity of the foundation.

At least one ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ senior received a Watson Fellowship every year from 1985 through 2000. ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ students or graduates also received Watsons in 2002-03 and 2006-09.

With the ultimate aim of teaching contemporary drama in her native Sri Lanka, a ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College senior has received a 2009 Thomas J. Watson Fellowship to study performance arts in South Africa and Indonesia. Sulochana Dissanayake of Pita Kotte, Sri Lanka, is one of 40 recipients of the 2009 fellowship, a $28,000 award supporting a year of independent research abroad.

What Dissanayake learns during her Watson year will support her ambition of creating a theatrical practice that brings social and political issues to Sri Lanka’s rich performance traditions. She hopes to “establish an institution that provides the equivalent of an undergraduate degree in theater and the performing arts,” Dissanayake explains.

Khoa Pham, a ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College senior from Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, has received one of 50 prestigious research fellowships awarded by the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship Program.

Pham, a double major in economics and politics, won the $25,000 Watson Fellowship for a research proposal titled “Exploring Global Vietnamese Youth in Search of Identity.”

Pham’s Watson year, which will begin in August, will allow him to spend approximately two months each in France, Germany, the Czech Republic, Russia, Japan and Australia, where he will live and interact with Vietnamese youth. Interested in similarities and differences between the Vietnamese students in different countries, he hopes to answer the questions, “What creates these differences and commonalities? Was it because of the Vietnam-U.S. war; the culture, society and politics of the host countries; or simply the way we were raised and educated?”

The Watson Fellowship is designed to identify potential leaders and challenge them in ways that foster independence, a global perspective and adaptability to new cultures. It funds research, conducted outside the formal academic environment and the recipient’s home culture, into a topic deeply important to the recipient.

Pham intends to gain a more informed sense of how the global community of Vietnamese youth relates to Vietnam, and, more importantly, develops creative ways in which its members can contribute to Vietnam’s future growth. “In the end,” he says, “all this will help me understand my own identity better and become more ‘globally conscious.'”

Pham emphasizes that ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ has offered him extraordinary support for ideas and projects, as well as ample opportunities in terms of networking and funding to explore his passion. “Whenever I came up with an idea,” he says, “no matter how ‘weird’ it may have sounded, the response from the people at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ I sought support from has always been, ‘Let’s make it happen.'”

Though hard to quantify exactly, he says, a large part of the inspiration for the Watson project stems from the nourishment provided by ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½. Pham places this experience in cultural context: “I was mostly educated in Vietnam, where rote memorization and finding answers, though certainly deserving some merit, are disproportionately more important than analytical thinking and asking questions.”

At ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, he says, “I learned to think creatively, question assumptions and take advantage of all available resources to ‘make it happen.’ While all of these qualities might be taken for granted in the United States, they are indeed a privilege for someone like me. ”

Joined by Trang Nguyen ’07 of Hanoi, Vietnam, and with financial support from ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, Pham established a forum called VietAbroader in 2005. The program supports Vietnamese students studying in the United States and helps other Vietnamese students who want to study here. Linking students at home and abroad, VietAbroader has organized seminars in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. The program has attracted support from other U.S. colleges and Vietnamese businesses.

A program of the Thomas J. Watson Foundation, of Providence, R.I., the Watson Fellowship was established in 1968 by the wife and children of Thomas J. Watson Sr., the founder of IBM. The 50 Watson recipients this year were selected from 179 finalists nominated by the colleges and universities they attend.

At least one ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ senior received a Watson Fellowship every year from 1985 through 2000, and in 2002, 2003 and 2006.

Amanda Harrow has pursued her interest in child-protection policy and practice through an internship with the Massachusetts Department of Social Services and through her ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ senior thesis, which has examined interventional approaches to domestic violence through service-learning work at the Abused Women’s Advocacy Project, Lewiston.

For her Watson Fellowship research year, which begins this summer, “in each country I’m looking at a different aspect or a different player in the realm of protecting kids,” Harrow explains.

In New Zealand, she will research family counseling practices adapted by the state from the customs of the indigenous Maori people.

In Peru, she will look at the role played by nongovernmental organizations in child protection and adoption, as well as residual effects on domestic violence rates from the long war against the Shining Path insurgency.

In Uganda, Harrow will investigate how various religious organizations function in the child-protection role and how AIDS has affected traditionally resilient family structures. Finally, in Sweden, she plans to examine the correlation between the robust state welfare system and low rates of child abuse.

Harrow is also one of two recipients of ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½’ 2006 in Justice and Peace, bestowed in March. An organizer of the New World Coalition and the Women’s Resource Center, and a member of the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Emergency Medical Services board, Harrow has been active in various social justice groups in Lewiston-Auburn. She has worked extensively to promote gender equality and redress the consequences of inequality through her work with the Abused Women’s Advocacy Project, the Massachusetts Commission on the Status of Women and RAINN, the national sexual assault hotline.

The Watson “is really amazing, and it’s an honor,” Harrow says. “I’m really excited, and I’m definitely slightly terrified,” she adds with a laugh.