A Brooklyn woman with a passion for civil rights is among the latest group of prestigious Rhodes Scholars.
Thamara Jean completed her senior thesis at CUNY’s Hunter College on the Black Lives Matter movement, according to Debbie Raskin, a Hunter spokeswoman.
The 22-year-old child of Haitian immigrants is among 32 men and women from the United States who have been chosen for post-graduate studies at Oxford University in England.
She is also one of 10 African-American scholars, the most ever in a single Rhodes class.
That group includes Simone Askew, the first black woman to lead the Corps of Cadets at West Point.
Also joining the list are a wrestler at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who’s helping to create a prosthetic knee for use in the developing world and a Portland, Ore., man who has studied gaps in his hometown’s “sanctuary city” policy protecting immigrants in the country illegally from deportation.
Their study starts in October.
“This year’s selections — independently elected by 16 committees around the country meeting simultaneously — reflects the rich diversity of America,” Elliot F. Gerson, American secretary of the Rhodes Trust, said in a statement Sunday.
“They plan to study a wide range of fields across the social sciences, biological and medical sciences, physical sciences and mathematics and the humanities.”
Calvin Runnels, of Baton Rouge, La., who is also on the list, is the second self-identified transgender Rhodes Scholar from the U.S., following Pema McLaughlin, who was named to the elite list last year.
The scholarships are worth about $68,000 per year, according to the Rhodes Trust. About 100 scholars will be selected worldwide. The first class of American Rhodes Scholars entered Oxford in 1904.
With News Wire Services
