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Rhodes Scholarship winners Aisha Ihab Saad and Elisabeth “Lisette” Yorke of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have been selected as members of USA Today’s 2009 All-USA College Academic First Team.

Rhodes Scholarship winners Aisha Ihab Saad and Elisabeth “Lisette” Yorke of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have been selected as members of USA Today’s 2009 All-USA College Academic First Team.

Saad and Yorke were two of 20 undergraduates chosen by a panel of judges from among hundreds of college juniors and seniors. Each will receive a $2,500 cash award. The winners, called “the nation’s most gifted college students,” were announced in today’s (April 29) issue of USA Today in a story available at http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2009-04-29-college-all-stars_N.htm.  Yorke is pictured on the paper’s front page.

Only one other North Carolina school – Wake Forest University – had a student in the top 20; the only other schools with two scholars in the group were the U.S. Naval Academy and Yale. The annual award program, now in its 20th year, honors full-time undergraduate students with exceptional academic and extracurricular accomplishments.

The most important selection criterion for the awards is the student’s essay describing his or her most outstanding intellectual endeavor during college. Grades, academic rigor, leadership and activities also are considered. Winners must excel both on and off campus.

Saad, a senior from Cary, is majoring in environmental health sciences in the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health and in Spanish in the College of Arts and Sciences. In enrichment experiences funded by her Morehead-Cain Scholarship to Carolina – a full, four-year merit award – Saad has interned with government ministries in Peru and in the blood diseases ward of Cairo University’s Teaching Hospitals. She will graduate May 10 as a public service scholar – a student who has performed at least 300 hours of public service while at Carolina.

Yorke, of Hillside Boularderie, Nova Scotia, is a senior biology major in the College of Arts and Sciences. Also a Morehead-Cain Scholar, Yorke has conducted AIDS research in Thailand and Cambodia. She is writing an honors thesis on molecular biology and immunology and hopes to become a doctor, a post she said will help her combat the HIV/AIDS pandemic. She volunteers in the burn unit at UNC Hospitals, visiting disfigured patients. She has competed on the men’s ice hockey club and the women’s varsity rowing team.

For more information on Saad, visit http://uncnews.unc.edu/content/view/1917/107/. For more on Yorke, visit http://uncnews.unc.edu/content/view/1957/75/.

Both students will head to Oxford University in England on Rhodes Scholarships this fall.

News Services contact: LJ Toler, (919) 962-8589

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