Three local academic all-stars are one step closer to changing the world after winning a prestigious graduate fellowship.
D.C. residents Gruia Badescu, Anne Thompson and Christina Arnold won the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation Graduate Scholarship, which awards up to $50,000 per year for graduate study. Fifty-nine other students received the honor, which is targeted at promising students with great financial need.
Born in Romania, Badescu discovered his passion for architecture and urban design as an 11-year-old while exploring bombed-out buildings in Bucharest. Since then, Badescu has been interested in postwar reconstruction.
“What do you do when you have a war that destroys the city? Do you reconstruct the past or do you start it from scratch?” he said.
Badescu will start a graduate program at the London School of Economics for urban planning and policy in the fall. He hopes to travel to Bosnia-Herzegovina or Lebanon after graduation to help with reconstruction efforts.
After speaking with Mexican health workers and Spanish citizens about their encounters with terrorism, Thompson decided that many people affected by international policies are not heard by most decision makers.
“I’m interested in getting to the voices of people who are often left behind in mainstream coverage,” she said.
Thomspon has worked at two advocacy nonprofits since graduating from Georgetown University in 2004. She will attend Harvard Kennedy School of Government in the fall to pursue a master’s degree in international public policy. As an undergraduate, Thompson started working with a professor producing a documentary about European terrorism, and hopes to use her film skills to bring a more personal angle to future policy debates.
Arnold will attend American University for a master’s in public administration and a law degree. She founded a nongovernmental organization to prevent human trafficking, and has pledged to help trafficking survivors she has met in Thailand.
