Senior
Andrew Serazin has been many places the past four years: West
Africa to research malaria; Tucson, Arizona, to live in the Biosphere;
Johannesburg, South Africa, to attend a United Nations' summit
on sustainable development.
Next fall he'll settle down for at least two years in England
when he becomes Notre Dame's 14th Rhodes Scholar.
As one of 32 Americans selected for the prestigious award from
a pool of more than 900 applicants, Serazin will be attending
the University of Oxford on a full scholarship valued at approximately
$30,000 per year. The biology major, who last fall became the
youngest lead author of an article published in the prestigious
scholarly journal Science, plans to earn a master's degree
and possibly a doctorate in bioscience.
Serazin's road to the Rhodes Scholarship began last spring when
he started work on the program's challenging written application.
(One question from a past application: "Name a Shakespearean play
that you would recommend to both George Bush and Saddam Hussein.")
He was encouraged to apply by biology professor and former Rhodes
Scholar David Lodge. After his interviews at the University and
state levels, a panel of faculty members and
former Rhodes scholars named him a finalist. Finally, in early
December he traveled to Chicago for a meeting with a six-person
selection committee in charge of the Midwest.
"They have this cocktail party the night before the interviews
where you shmooze and try not to look too awkward," Serazin recalls.
The interview was the next day: a mere 15 minutes of questions
about current events, literature, his academic courses. Within
hours he was told he'd been selected.
Created in 1902, the Rhodes Scholarship program is named for
British philanthropist and colonial pioneer Cecil Rhodes, who
wanted to bring together outstanding students from countries around
the world to study at Oxford, regardless of their fields of academic
interest. The criteria he set in his will included high academic
achievement but also integrity, a spirit of unselfishness, respect
for others, potential for leadership and "physical vigor," the
last perhaps explaining why a large number of student-athletes
have been Rhodes Scholars. The program each year selects 98 scholars,
32 of whom are American. Serazin will be a member of the 100th
class.
Serazin's distinction in biological sciences began in high school
when he obtained a summer job at the public health department
near his hometown of Elyira, Ohio, west of Cleveland. During the
summer of 2000 he interned at the National Institute for Health
Care Management in Washington, D.C. Then, during his sophomore
year, he started working with mentor Nora J. Besansky, professor
of biological sciences, on a project involving malaria mosquito
genomics. He would later travel with Besansky to Burkina Faso,
a small country in West Africa, to study mosquitoes' role in the
transmission of malaria.
"[The place] really got inside me," says Serazin, who returned
to West Africa this past August for research and hopes to visit
again someday. "Poor people there are a lot different than poor
people here." Forty-five percent of Burkina Faso's population
lives below the poverty line.
Serazin's historic article in Science, co-written with
Besanski, described their two years of work sequencing the genome
of Anopheles gambiae, the primary mosquito species that
transmits the malaria parasite to humans.
But Serazin insists that the scientific aspect of his research
is not his main concern.
"When I wake up in the morning, malaria is not the first thing
on my mind -- at least not the science side of it. I think about
what we can do to make drugs available to people."
Serazin's long-term goals involve higher education and public
policy, not laboratory research. After he completes his doctorate,
which will keep him in Oxford for at least three years, he plans
to explore another side of research: how to approach such global
problems as malaria by combining the efforts of scientists and
policy-makers.
In the meantime, he is still trying to decide what to do this
summer -- work for a policy and research group in Washington,
D.C.; or follow a lifelong interest of his father and grandfather
and take a job in a carpentry shop.
