A student who hopes to someday explore the solar system is one of 31 U.S. students to receive a Gates Cambridge Scholarship funded by an endowment from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Senior Joannah Metz from Champaign will receive approximately $38,000 to cover the full cost of studies at Cambridge University in England as well as travel and living expenses.
"This will be the 14th consecutive year that the University of Illinois has sent a student to Cambridge on a prestigious scholarship," says David Schug, who heads the campus's Scholarships for International Study Office. Administered by the Gates Cambridge Trust since 2001, the Gates Cambridge Scholarships are awarded on the basis of a person's intellectual ability, leadership capacity, and desire to use their knowledge to contribute to society.
Metz, who has three majors—astronomy, geophysics, and engineering physics—focuses on the extraterrestrial. In fall 2004, she will begin a one-year master's program at the University of Cambridge in the field of polar studies. At Cambridge, she will study glacimarine sedimentation—the delivery of sediments from ice sheets to the ocean and the patterns of sedimentation formed by this process. Metz says that understanding this extreme environment will help prepare her to search for life on other planets, especially Mars, which is her ultimate goal.
Metz has been fascinated with space since childhood, when she saw an eclipse of the moon. As an undergraduate at Illinois, she gained research experience working with astronomy professor You-Hua Chu and geology and microbiology professor Bruce Fouke. She has participated in research projects at NASA, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the University of Manchester, England, where she studied during the fourth year of her five-year academic program in the colleges of Liberal Arts and Sciences and Engineering.
After she completes her studies at Cambridge, Metz plans to return to the United States to pursue a doctorate in planetary science at MIT. Someday she hopes to become an astronaut and conduct fieldwork on Mars.
