Eric Mooring (COL ’13) has been awarded a Churchill Scholarship and will study infectious disease at Cambridge University next year.
The Churchill Scholarship, named after British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, has given U.S. citizens between the ages of 19 and 26 the opportunity to pursue graduate research programs in engineering, mathematics and biological and physical sciences since its inception in 1963.
Mooring is one of only 14 Americans this year to be chosen by the Winston Churchill Foundation of the United States.
“I am excited and humbled to receive a Churchill Scholarship,” he wrote in an email. “While Iknew I was a serious candidate for the scholarship, I also knew there were far more highly qualified candidates than there were available scholarships; I don’t think anyone ever expects to be one of just fourteen winners in a national competition, so in that sense I was surprised to win.”
Mooring, who is an environmental biology and government double major with a minor in mathematics, hopes to help control infectious disease in animals and humans, according to a university press release. He intends to pursue a master of philosophy degree in veterinary science while at Cambridge.
“I’m looking forward to attending CambridgeUniversity and having the opportunity to take what I have learned at Georgetown about ecology and about infectious diseases and apply that knowledge to solving new problems,” Mooring wrote.
Mooring is Georgetown’s third Churchill Scholar. Past recipients were Iga Wegorzewska (COL ’04) and Cara Marie Malandro (COL ’06).
Wegorzewska, since receiving her degree from Cambridge, has gone on to work for the Uniformed services University of Health Sciences. She has published and co-authored numerous articles in neuroscience, cell biology and biochemistry.
Malandrio currently is a third-year graduate student in the Chemistry-Biology Interface Program at The Johns Hopkins University. After majoring at Georgetown in biology and mathematics, she studied multidrug resistance at Cambridge’s Department of Pharmacology.
