THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY OFFICE OF NEWS AND INFORMATION
3003 N. Charles Street, Suite 100
Baltimore, Maryland 21218-3843
Phone: (410) 516-7160 / Fax (410) 516-5251
February 18, 1999
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
MEDIA CONTACT:
Leslie Rice
[email protected]
JOHNS HOPKINS TO OFFER $10K GRANTS FOR UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH
Incoming, Current Students Can Apply
The Johns Hopkins University's Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences has created one more way for its undergraduates to get hands-on experience in demanding, graduate-level research projects. Perhaps the largest university-funded undergraduate research program in the country, the Woodrow Wilson Research Program will offer 20 incoming freshmen and 10 current freshmen $10,000 over four years to create their own scholarly research projects. Applications are currently being accepted.
The grants will be made to support a wide range of research possibilities. It might enable a history student to spend a summer working in the national archives in Mexico City, allow an aspiring economist an unpaid internship at the Federal Reserve or provide a premedical student with a piece of computer equipment needed to analyze data.
The program is intended to support freshmen who, in high school or during their freshman year at Hopkins, have demonstrated a commitment to an area of study and an ability to focus on a specific topic. Along with the research funding, it will provides special faculty mentoring and a capstone seminar during their senior year.
The Woodrow Wilson Research Program is one of several grant opportunities at Hopkins designed to advance undergraduate independent scholarship and research in the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences. About 80 percent of Hopkins undergraduates engage in some form of independent study for credit. Research and grant opportunities already abound. The Provost's Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Research, for example, offers 50 undergraduates up to $2,500 in research funding.
Named for the only U.S. president ever to have held a doctorate (from Johns Hopkins, in history, political science, 1886), the Woodrow Wilson Research Program was initiated by Herbert L. Kessler, dean of the university's School of Arts and Sciences and Charlotte Bloomberg Professor in the Humanities. Hopkins trustee J. Barclay Knapp Jr. was instrumental in working with Kessler in finding funding and putting the program together.
Kessler said he hopes the highly selective program will attract some of the country's most promising young scholars to Hopkins and enhance the university's commitment to offering its undergraduates uncommon opportunities in research.
"Scholarship and research form the unique core of intellectual life and education at Johns Hopkins," explained Kessler. "That singular character is not rooted in textbooks or in perfected lecture notes. Rather it grows from excavations in Egypt, in the control center of a space-explorer satellite, in the study of a Baltimore City community, wherever original investigations are producing new knowledge and generating new inquiry."
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