Senior wins Penn State's 1st Winston Churchill Scholarship

University Park, Pa. -- Danielle Perry, a senior physics major at Penn State and member of the Schreyer Honors College, has won the Winston Churchill Scholarship for a fully paid year of academic study at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom. Perry is the first Penn State student to win the Churchill Scholarship.

The Winston Churchill Foundation has supported American students of math, science, and engineering since 1963. Historically, Churchill Scholars compile exceptional academic and extra-curricular records. Perry will join an elite group of 11 students nationwide who are selected as Churchill Scholars each year.

Perry also won a five-year National Institutes of Health (NIH)-Cambridge University Graduate Partnerships Fellowship earlier in the spring semester, which she will use in conjunction with her Churchill scholarship. (See http://www.live.psu.edu/story/6033 for the NIH-Cambridge story.)

In addition, she won a Fulbright Scholarship to work with Michael Breakspear at the Brain Dynamics Centre in Sydney, Australia, and was named the "most achieving undergraduate woman student" from Penn State's Commission on Women.

Perry spent most of her early years being home-schooled. Before studying at Penn State's Berks and University Park campuses, she attended nursing school at Reading Hospital, where she was first in her class.

She serves as an officer in the Society of Physics Students, the Association for Women in Mathematics, and is a volunteer counselor for the International Hospitality Council. Perry was also a Pennsylvania state finalist for the Rhodes competition and conducts research in both science and linguistics.

Perry will graduate from Penn State with a bachelor of science in physics and a minor in mathematics. She will graduate with honors in physical chemistry, having researched synthetic cells with possible uses in drug delivery. She has also conducted research in Japanese avant-garde literature. All of this has led to her interest in the science of linguistics and in brain imaging analysis of linguistic processing within the human cortex.

At Penn State, Perry works on National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded research in the laboratory of Christine Keating. She had also conducted NSF-funded research in a collaborative effort between Bucknell University, Geisinger Medical Center's Neurology Unit and the Weis Research Center, under the direction of Martin Ligare, on the physical modeling of nerve impulses. She spent this past summer as a scholar in the Biomaterials and Bionanotechonology Summer Institute, funded by both NSF and the NIH.

Perry is the daughter of Holly Zurn Perry of Drexel Hill and John F. Perry of Birdsboro, and has 10 siblings, including two sisters who will also study at Oxford this fall.