GeoGator PhD students Aghane Antunes and Shreejana Bhattarai among the 2021 recipients of the O. Ruth McQuown Scholarship. The O. Ruth McQuown Scholarship Award has been established to aid scholars who best exemplify Dr. McQuown’s values, achievements and commitment to social issues (including addressing issues and fostering opportunities for women, racial minorities and those of low socio-economic background). These scholarships are made possible through the private donations of numerous friends of O. Ruth McQuown, the estate of O. Ruth McQuown and of her sister, Johanna Watts, and matching funds from the State of Florida.
Aghane is a Latin American woman, wife, and mother who is a first-generation college student from Amazonia. She had many barriers to overcome – racial, gender, and economic – to be here. Aghane has coauthored several papers including Avoiding Amazonian Catastrophes: Prospects for Conservation in the 21st Century, Discipline and Develop: Destruction of the Brazil Nut Forest in the Lower Amazon Basin, and Science in support of Amazonian conservation in the 21st century: the case of Brazil.
Shreejana is a Medical Geographer from Nepal and is also a first-generation college student. As an undergrad, Shree helped form the ‘Nepal Youth Task Force on Rio+20’ to empower youth and raise awareness of climate change and sustainable development. Shreejana has coauthored Understanding the relationship between land use and land cover and malaria in Nepal and Predicting the hotspots of age-adjusted mortality rates of lower respiratory infection across the continental United States: Integration of GIS, spatial statistics and machine learning algorithms, with more publications in review and preparation.
The McQuown awards are made on a competitive basis to students in the fields of Humanities (e.g., Classics, English, History, Philosophy, Religion and Languages), Social Sciences (e.g., Anthropology, Economics, Geography, Political Science, Psychology and Sociology), Individual Interdisciplinary Studies (that include social sciences or humanities) and Women’s Studies and each awardee’s name is inscribed on a plaque displayed in the Center for Women’s Studies and Gender Research in Ustler Hall.
Congratulations Aghane and Shree!