Kelly '02 receives Gates Foundation scholarship

When Ann Kelly '02 opened her e-mail yesterday, she discovered she had been awarded Cambridge University's Gates Fellowship, a recently founded scholarship program similar to Oxford University's Rhodes.

Throughout the fellowship's application process, which included essays, recommendation letters and a panel interview completed just last week, Kelly had been told final decisions would be made in late February. So discovering the results yesterday must have been a shock.

Mostly, though, it was an honor.

The Gates Fellowship was founded in October 2001 when Bill Gates, CEO of Microsoft, gave $260 million to Cambridge to create a scholarship like that of the Rhodes, Assistant Dean of the College Marcia Cantarella said.

The fellowship provides either a second bachelors degree or a graduate degree to its beneficiaries. This is the first year the award has been given.

Kelly is an anthropology major from New York City. In addition to writing a thesis in that discipline, she is writing a creative thesis in poetry. She was also an editor of the Nassau Weekly. Essentially, what stands out about Kelly's work is breadth and depth of her interests, others have said.

The daughter of a doctor and an English professor, Kelly grew up immersed in the ideas of both science and the humanities and has found ways to study both fields simultaneously. After considering several majors, she settled on anthropology as a balance of historical analysis and cultural interpretation.

"I came to anthropology as an answer to my interdisciplinary interests," Kelly said. Specifically, she is interested in the history of medicine and the development of the microscope, the EKG electrocardiogram, and the X-ray. She is also exploring her idea that illness and its symptoms can, like poetry, be forms of expression.

Her way of thinking across the academic spectrum is what has been so impressive about Kelly's work, her professors said.

"Ann is just a very adventurous thinker who does dramatically interdisciplinary work," said James Boon, an anthropology professor who is one of Kelly's thesis advisers. "She doesn't set up any barriers between [her different disciplines]; she lets one enrich the other."

Kelly plans to use the Gates scholarship to earn her doctorate in anthropology at Cambridge. She intends to examine the origins of bioethics and the separation of human body and medicine.

"I think of [Kelly] as a New York City person who finds as rich and interesting a challenge in small-town Princeton," Boon said. "She will do wonderful work in her program in England as well."