Two Northwestern students were named Rhodes Scholars for 2009, the Rhodes Trust announced Sunday.

Weinberg senior Mallory Dwinal, of Gig Harbor, Wash., and Music senior Anna Yermakova, of Buffalo Grove, Ill., won the prestigious scholarship and will study at Oxford University.

According to the press release, “These basic characteristics are directed at fulfilling Mr. Rhodes’s hopes that the Rhodes Scholars would make an effective and positive contribution throughout the world. In Rhodes’ words, his scholars should ‘esteem the importance of public duties as their highest aim.’”

Both students easily met the criteria set by Cecil Rhodes’ will: Dwinal, a triple-major in Spanish, Economics and International Studies, is currently the leader of a daily meals program at a homeless shelter. She ranked among the top college students in the country in impromptu and extemporaneous speaking, and studied in Quingua University in Beijing during the summer of 2006.

“After being in China I realized how isolating it can be not to speak the language of the society you’re in. I was much more aware of that for immigrants [in America],” Dwinal said.

She founded SELF, Student Enterprise for Language Foundation, a program that coordinates and funds English as a second language education in Chicago elementary schools. A project, she said, that has helped her exercise her leadership and creative thinking skills.

“She amazes me,” said fellow classmate Liz Voeller, a McCormick senior. “She’s a really hard worker and does so many things but she’s humble about it. She makes a huge impact with everything that she works on.”

Last year Dwinal worked with a fifth-grade student from South America through SELF.

“She was very timid and shy at first,” Dwinal recounted. “It was hard to get her to speak in any language. Then she slowly started communicating, but only in Spanish. We worked and worked and slowly built up a relationship and chipped away at all the issues that were going on. By the end of the year she had advanced two grades in English. At the end she thanked me in English. It was one of those benchmarks that signaled how much we accomplished.”

Dwinal plans to do the Master of Science in Comparative and International Education at Oxford.

Following her completion of the one-year program, Dwinal plans to join Teach for America for two years and then attend Harvard Business School, both of which she has already been accepted to, with an eventual career goal of going into educational policy making.

“I’m really interested in alternative forms of education. The U.S. public education system is a great system — one of best in the world, [but] there are times that it fails…So, what other alternatives are there to make corrections besides the government after the public system falls short?” she said.

The second Northwestern recipient, Yermakova, was described by her longtime friend and former roommate, alumn Melanie Kahl, as “brilliant. Her whole brain and her body, she’s always trying to keep up with herself.”

Yermakova majors in Biochemistry, Piano, and History and Philosophy of Science and Logic. Her family immigrated to the United States from Russia when she was 11. Since then, she won national awards for piano and French, did research in neuroscience at Northwestern and biomedical engineering at the University of Chicago, and competed in ballroom dancing, salsa and flamenco.

Kahl calls her friend a holistic learner: “She connects things that you wouldn’t think would be connected and she’s always devising a way to fit another way of learning into her life”

Her research in chemical engineering and nanotechnology at the University of Washington resulted in the creation of a microfluidic assay which diagnosed blood clot ability.

“There was no single pool of data that would explain blood clot formation that took into account everything that goes into the blood clot formation,” Yermakova said, “The point of systems biology is to unite all of these fragmented pools of research data and combine them under the umbrella of one system.”

At Oxford, Anna will pursue a doctorate in mathematical biology.

Yermakova said she hoped “to expose myself to interdisciplinary research within complex systems from the perspective of biological science, social sciences, and music, and really find a way to integrate all the interests into a larger envelope.”

“I would ideally like to be a professor and continue research,” she added, “and studying this idea of systems and the ways this concept can be applied to so many systems and introducing mathematics to biological sciences and working in education for a while.”

The selection of Rhodes Scholars is not only a testament to the candidate but also to the university where they are receiving their education. Northwestern is one of three universities, along with Harvard and UCLA, to have two Rhodes scholars this year.

“Most colleges are thrilled to have one of its students win, so when one has doubly exciting success, it is certainly cause for pride,” said Rhodes Trust American Secretary Elliot F. Gerson.

Rhodes Scholarships provide all expenses for two or three years of study at the University of Oxford in England, and may allow funding in some instances for four years, according to a Rhodes Trust press release.

Rhodes Scholarships are “the oldest and best known award for international study, and arguably the most famous academic award available to American college graduates,” said Gerson in the press release.

Each year, 32 American men and women are chosen as Rhodes Scholars.

This year’s group will join a network of Rhodes Alumni, which include 42nd President of the United States, Bill Clinton, United States Army General Wesley Clark and two-time Pulitzer prize winning New York Times columnist, Nicholas D. Kristof, among the many other scholars who have gone on to hold prestigious positions in their field of expertise.

Dwinal and Yermakova weren’t the only Northwestern students to win prestigious scholarships that provide funding for graduate study abroad. Another student received a Marshall Scholarship while a fourth received a Mitchell Scholarship, according to a Northwestern press release.

Northwestern hasn’t had winners in all four scholarships since 2003, said Sara Vaux, director of the office of scholarships, in the release.

“This is very exciting news and a tribute to these remarkable students and all the people at
Northwestern who have helped them prepare for the scholarship competitions,” Vaux said in the press release. “We very fortunate to have students with such breadth of interest and depth of talent at Northwestern.”