The Irish-U. S. Alliance has all 12 members of the 2025 George J. Mitchell Fellowship.
Serena Wilson, program director, said, “Nearly 350 more people applied for the 12 grants, which is an increase of nearly 9% in the number of programs from last year. Drake University, Bryn Mawr College, and Tulane University have their first Mitchell Scholar Winners this year.
Trina Vargo, founder of the program, pointed out that “this year marks the 25th anniversary of the Alliance, the scholarship program and the Good Friday Peace Agreement. This agreement was presided over by Senator Mitchell.
As one of the country’s most prestigious scholarship programs, it sends long-term U. S. leaders to the island of Ireland for a year of graduate study, Vargo said.
Members of the selection committee included Don Bishop, a school admissions expert with forty-five years of experience; he recently retired as an undergraduate enrollment officer at the University of Notre Dame; Ryan Hanley, Mitchell Scholar alumnus and CEO of Equilibrium Energy; Orla Keane, Deputy Ambassador at the Embassy of Ireland in Washington, DC; Jennifer Lambert, Mitchell Scholar alumna and director of the State Department’s Office of Global Public Affairs Research; Katie McMahon, a global entrepreneur and generation executive who has been at the forefront of artificial intelligence and natural language technologies for more than twenty years; and Harry McNamara, an alumnus of Mitchell Scholar, a tenured professor at Princeton, and clinical co-founder of c16 Biosciences.
Main supporters of the program are the Irish Department of Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science and Strong Roots, a vegan food company founded by Sam Dennigan. Modern Hire provides the video portion of the interview process.
The academics, he said, will begin their studies in Ireland and Northern Ireland in September 2024.
Below is the Class of 2025 George J. Mitchell Scholars.
Tyler Bartolome, from Lincoln, Nebraska, graduated from Drake University with 4 majors in Biochemistry, Cellular and Molecular Biology; Math; Biology; and chemistry. He needs to use biotechnology studies and foreign public policy to fight climate change, and won a highly competitive Barry Goldwater Scholarship for his studies and educational achievements. Tyler led Drake University’s SPARCC (Semi-Passive Algae Rooted Carbon Caption) team to compete in the OpenAir Carbon Removal Challenge, where they were the only American team in the finals. He actually pursued biotechnology studies in his undergraduate studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Drake University, and Johns Hopkins University. As the first two-term president of the Drake Chapter of Beta Beta Beta, an honor society for the life sciences, Tyler and his team doubled the organization’s life and investment. Tyler is also president and founder of The Oral Record Institute, a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization that collects and preserves the “oral histories” of Americans who have experienced military conflicts, to better understand the effect that early ancient events they have in Americans. . Array In his free time he trains for triathlons, studies Arabic and plays the mandolin. Tyler will be studying Biotechnology at University College Cork.
Sam Bisno, of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, is a senior at Princeton, where he studies History.The son of lifelong labor organizers, Sam spent summers working to win safe staffing standards for Rhode Island’s nursing home workers and encouraging investment in clean energy and union jobs for the Appalachia region’s workers. He was the recipient of the Carter Combe Prize for the best junior-year independent work in History at Princeton. Sam is Editor-in-Chief of the Princeton Historical Review and Editor-in-Chief of The Nassau Weekly. For the Princeton Asylum Project, he researches conditions in asylum seekers’ countries of origin, and he is an active member of an organization advocating for an end to mass incarceration. He spent a summer interning for StoryCorps. Knowing that Irish leaders, like Daniel O’Connell, were staunch abolitionists and, conversely, that many older Irish families had been slaveholders and that many Irish Americans were among the most outspoken working-class supporters of slavery, Sam wishes to research how transatlantic slavery and abolitionism influenced the trajectory of both Ireland and the US. Planning a career as a scholar of transatlantic slavery and labor history Sam wants to combine his passion for history with his commitment to social justice. Sam will study History at Queen’s University Belfast.
Anika Cho, from Beaverton, Oregon, is a senior at the University of Alabama studying electrical engineering and physics. She is interested in devising acoustic strategies and technologies that advance ocean exploration. Anika is a recipient of the 2022 NOAA Hollings Fellowship, through which she worked with NOAA Ocean Exploration on acoustic data from deep-sea surveys to conduct an ecological study of an underwater canyon. With an REU from the National Science Foundation, Anika spent two summers at the Dauphin Island Sea Lab, building inexpensive tools to measure the physical habitations of seawater and the seafloor, and presented her effects at the ASLO Aquatic Sciences International 2023 assembly. in Palma de Mallorca. . Array Spain. She is also studying at the University of Alabama and has created a compact acoustic modem capable of wirelessly sending and receiving knowledge encoded in underwater acoustic signals. Anika is vice president of the Amateur Radio Club and volunteered as event captain to organize a regional Science Olympiad hosted by the University of Alabama. In her free time, Anika is the concertmaster of her network orchestra, she is a PADI certified diver and a mentor for the MATE ROV underwater robotics team. Anika will be studying Electrical and Electronic Engineering at University College Cork.
Anna Clark, originally from Tokyo, Japan and Danbury, Connecticut, and most recently living in the Philippines, is a senior at Stanford University who earned a bachelor’s degree in Engineering Physics and a master’s degree in Management Science and Array Engineering. She is interested in large-scale force systems engineering. she design more effective and resilient power systems that allow greater penetration of renewable power into the network. Anna is a Stanford Schultz Graduate Fellow at the Department of Energy SULI and a research assistant at the Stanford Natural Capital Project. She presented a first-author paper at the TORQUE convention organized through the European Wind Energy Academy, which was published in the “Journal of Physics: Conference Series”. As president of the Stanford Energy Club, she connected scholars to current careers and studies, founded a five-week boot camp for new college students to engage in conversations with powerhouse leaders in industry and academia, and raised $30,000 for the club. She co-founded the POWER initiative to introduce scholars from marginalized communities to compelling subjects through graduate student presentations about their studies. In her spare time, Anna dives, is an amateur pastry chef and runs (preferably partial marathons). Anna will be examining Smart and Sustainable Cities at Trinity College Dublin.
Owen Emerson, of Huntsville, Alabama, graduated from the University of Alabama, where he studied economics. He is a guitarist and singer-songwriter who fuses Appalachian folk music techniques with trendy pop and select rock styles. Noting the influence of the Ulster Scots on Appalachian music, he wishes to become a documentarian and educator of the Appalachian-Irish musical heritage. As an economist and marketing professional, Owen works with nonprofit organizations in rural Alabama to create cultural and tourism progression systems for small local communities. He introduced internship systems to link University of Alabama scholars with rural Alabama nonprofits seeking volunteers and designed social media tourism campaigns for small Alabama towns whose civil rights history is underappreciated. His volunteer activities include applying to a food bank in west Alabama and helping top at-risk school students in Marion, Alabama, create strong school applications. Owen plans to combine music making and cultural preservation to serve East Tennessee Appalachia: recording and performing neo-folk songs for broader audiences while serving as educational programs manager at the Great Smoky Mountains National Heritage Center and other cultural non-profit organizations in Knoxville, Tennessee. He needs to be an ambassador for Irish-American folk music to the region’s tens of millions of annual tourists. Owen will be examining Music and Media Technology at Trinity College Dublin.
Chicago resident Thomas “Tommy” Hagan earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the University of Chicago. For the past decade, he has taken in criminals every week to build networks with incarcerated people. Two years ago, Tommy and two friends imprisoned abroad introduced the REAL Youth Initiative, which runs weekly workshops for three youth offenders and physically powerful networked reentry systems, plus paid scholarships and care networks. As a member of the Coalition to Decarcerate Illinois, Tommy helped lobby the EPA regarding violations of the federal Safe Drinking Water Act by the state’s criminals. At Northwestern Law School’s Child and Family Justice Center, he co-led a crusade to wipe out the five remaining young offenders in Illinois. Tommy has run several marathons to raise money for various causes. Tommy, an Irish-American, learned from his grandparents about reports of his cousins imprisoned in Long Kesh and H Blocks in the 1980s, and recently learned that a relative of his had died in the 1981 hunger strike. In comparing criminal systems, Tommy will examine Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Ulster.
Christopher Kuo, originally from Wellesley, Massachusetts, recently graduated from Duke University with degrees in Political Science and English. He is now a Reporting Fellow on the Culture desk at the New York Times. In pas summers, he interned at the Tampa Bay Times, and the Los Angeles Times. Chris has won multiple awards for his reporting including being part of a Duke Chronicle team of editors that won a 2022 Pacemaker from the Associated College Press, recognizing the best in college journalism. He was also the Editor-in Chief of Duke Crux, an undergraduate journal of Christian thought, and he was the Travel Team Captain of Duke’s nationally competitive Moot Court which sent multiple teams to regional tournaments and to the national championship. Chris has been involved in various charities, including creating a podcast for Simple Charity, a nonprofit that raises money for various Christian charities around the world. He also participated in service trips to Guatemala and Ecuador. He hopes to one day take charge of a global news organization, fostering partnerships between journalists in America and around the world to exchange best practices and brainstorm solutions to the industry’s challenges. Chris will study Journalism at the University of Limerick.
Elizaveta “Lisa” Maslovskaya, a resident of Norman, Oklahoma, is a senior at the University of Oklahoma reading arts media production and French. She is a Russian immigrant and became a US citizen a year ago. Lisa is a documentary filmmaker who filmed Hurricane Ian in Florida, where she and her team focused on journalists and meteorologists who continued to report on the crisis through the horrors of the storm. This year alone, she won 8 awards for her documentaries and recently won a university scholarship to study and film a documentary about the war in Ukraine. Two of her documentaries have won awards from the National Broadcast Education Association. She recently won the National IDEA Inspire the Passion award for her work with the NBA’s Oklahoma City Thunder. Her goal is to understand the effect of host countries on refugees around the world. Her recent documentary focuses on Ukrainian refugees in the United States and their lives a year and a half after the start of the war. Noting that Ireland has noted a significant increase in the number of immigrants and refugees in recent years, she now hopes to examine how Ireland treats refugees and immigrants. Lisa will examine documentary practice at Dublin City University.
Chloe Nguyen, of Las Vegas, Nevada, is a senior at Duke University where she studies Public Policy with a minor in Psychology. Chloe is the founder of Duke Justice Project, a club addressing mass incarceration and improving re-entry in North Carolina. The group’s projects include weekly GED tutoring classes, assisting lawyers with expungement petitions, and executing a supply drive for a transitional home. Committed to decreasing political polarization on campus, and connecting ideologically diverse students across campus, in partnership with Braver Angels, she has organized structured debates on difficult topics ranging from social media censorship to reparations. At WRAL TV, she is a Poynter-Google News Initiative Misinformation Student Fellow, investigating barriers to news access for Spanish speaking communities and surveying those communities to determine perception of and trust in fact-checking. As a reporter for 9th Street Journal, Chloe broke a story on a blackout at an affordable housing complex for seniors and disabled people which resulted in internal policy change to increase safety for seniors and disabled persons during blackouts. She aspires to continue learning how the online micro-targeting of disinformation and political advertisements into diverse communities amplifies offline polarization and violence and plans for a legal career in technology regulation. Chloe will study Digital Policy and University College Dublin.
New York resident Isabel Plakas is pursuing a master’s degree in nursing at the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing. She earned her bachelor’s degree in psychology from Bryn Mawr College. Isabel has spent the last five years working as a damage repair specialist in Philadelphia, Spain, Boston, and Baltimore. She received a Nursing Scholar Award from the National Association of Hispanic Nurses and was identified through Boston Medical Center for implementing a harm relief program at a new transitional housing site that also served as an overdose monitoring unit. 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. She promoted healthcare accessibility for the homeless in Boston by operating a mobile medical clinic and engaging youth with substance use disorders by creating a new delivery service. Working at Boston Hope, a 1,000-bed medical center for homeless people recovering from coronavirus infection, she has prevented overdose deaths during a time when people were more isolated than usual. She is co-president of Nursing Students for Harm Reduction at Hopkins. Isabel is also a volunteer with No One Dies Alone, an organization that helps offer a dignified death to people who do not have a close circle of family or friends to accompany them at the end of life. Isabel will study pharmacological treatment at Trinity College Dublin.
Kiera Sky Torpie, originally from New York, graduated from Tulane University, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in Linguistics and International Development. Since she was little, Keira understood that writing had the power to create connections. Her dates with her imprisoned father had a lot to do with her letters. After her father died, she learned that writing can also heal. At Tulane, she created a workshop for women whose families have been affected by incarceration. Last summer she performed her play Sunny Makes a Scene at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. The dark comedy follows a teenager who wreaks havoc at her father’s Irish Catholic vigil. To address the issue of addiction, she collaborated with a local harm relief organization that attended all the functions and distributed overdose prevention resources to shoppers when they left. Her purpose is to create cathartic healing reports for others through writing. She currently works part-time as a space manager at a non-profit theater in New York City. While living in Los Angeles, she served as an associate producer for an unscripted television show at NBC, an executive assistant at HBO Max, and held production assistant positions on commercials, short films, and music videos. Kiera will examine art writing at Queen’s University Belfast.
Coleman Yorke, of New York, New York, was an undergraduate at Columbia University where he studied English and Psychology, and a Masters’ student at Oxford University where he studied Clinical and Therapeutic Neuroscience. He is currently living in South Korea as a Luce Scholar, working in a lab at Yonsei University deepening his understanding of adolescent mental healthcare. Coleman is interested in redefining our cultural conception of mental illness as an objective health concern, rather than portraying it as a weakness, hopes to provide mental health education and clinical care as an adolescent psychiatrist. In his dissertation at Oxford, he first looked at the how social isolation experienced during the pandemic, posed significant challenges to adolescent mental health. Next, he studied the relationship between age, mental health, and antidepressant use during the COVID-19 pandemic. Coleman served many hours as a Crisis Counselor, Grief Facilitator, Hospice Volunteer, Patient Escort or Caregiver Support Volunteer for many organizations, lending his counsel for people in their worst moments. In his free time, he can often be found at a rock-climbing gym or reading 19th century novels. Coleman will study Global Mental Health at Trinity College Dublin.