6 With Area Ties Win Scholarship to Study at Oxford University

Recipients Have Goals That Include Tackling Poverty, Improving Global Health and Advancing Science

It occurred to Melis N. Anahtar's family that she might have a future in science when she began building robots and little toy cars, using plain blocks and then invention kits.

She was in second grade.

On Saturday, Anahtar's scientific bent paid off when she was among 32 college students from across the country, including six with ties to the Washington area, who were selected as Rhodes scholars and will spend two or three years of graduate study at Oxford University in England.

"I'm tremendously excited," Anahtar, 21, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology senior from Bethesda, said yesterday. She has a perfect academic record at MIT -- A's in all her courses, including linguistics and fiction reading -- and plans to study immunology. Of course, she's practically an expert already, having worked in six laboratories and designed a device that isolates white blood cells to better understand how the human body reacts to injury.

All of the Washington area scholars boast similar achievements in science, international affairs and world development issues while balancing their academic research with cultural passions.

Nadine S. Levin, for example, is studying bubonic plague and worked on developing an experimental vaccine for the ancient illness, which still appears occasionally. She's also a concert violinist, a student of Spanish literature and a nationally competitive ultimate Frisbee player.

"I have to sit down and look at my name in order to believe it," said Levin, 20, of her selection. She is a University of Chicago senior from the District who plans to study global health science.

The Rhodes scholarships were created in 1902 in the will of British philanthropist Cecil Rhodes, a diamond magnate. Winners are selected on the basis of qualities that include academic achievement, character and leadership potential.

More than 750 students from 295 colleges and universities applied for this year's scholarships, which are worth an average of about $45,000 per year.

Elliot F. Gerson, American secretary for the Rhodes Trust, said this year's scholarship class includes several immigrants or first-generation Americans, an increasing trend in recent years, and also is noteworthy because of the scholars' interests. "Almost all of them are interested in applying their skills to major social problems," he said.

For Andrew S. Hammond, that focus is fighting poverty. A 2007 graduate of the University of Chicago, he is a fellow at the Center for the Study of Social Policy in the District and has written extensively on poverty issues. "We have a society with massive inequalities," said Hammond, 22, who lives in the District and will study comparative social policy.

"I'm interested in how we match the will of the American people, which I think is generous and charitable, with a government that for some reason doesn't reflect those values," he said.

Katherine H.A. Vyborny and Joyce S. Meng plan to study issues of world development during their time at Oxford. "I think poverty is one of the key challenges facing the world today, and that's why I'm dedicating my career to fighting it," said Vyborny, 23, a University of Georgia graduate who lives in the District, where she works for the Center for Global Development.

Meng, a University of Pennsylvania senior from Vienna, co-founded a small bank that encourages entrepreneurship among disaffected street youth in Lagos, Nigeria. "It's really exciting," Meng, 21, said of the Rhodes honor. "It's almost unimaginable."

Also among the scholarship winners is John Blaine Moore, a senior at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis who is from Tennessee and plans to study pharmacology.