Tam ’13, Stouffer ’13 win Sachs Scholarships

Stephanie Tam ’13 and Kaitlin Stouffer ’13 won this year’s two Sachs Scholarships, the University will announce today. Tam received the Sachs Scholarship at Worcester College, Oxford and will study there next year, and Stouffer received the Sachs Global Scholarship and will spend next year working in South Africa.

Tam and Stouffer applied for the scholarships in late October and had their first-round interviews this past Saturday. Both turned up for what they thought would be their second-round interviews Sunday morning but instead learned from members of the Sachs Scholarship Committee they had been granted the award.

“I went in, and a member of the committee told me that there was something missing from my CV,” Stouffer said. “I was confused, and then he told me I was going to be the Scholar.”

This year was the first time the endowment level was large enough for the committee to announce two separate scholarships, one allowing students to study for a two-year degree at Oxford’s Worcester College and the other allowing students to either study for one year at any institution outside the United States or pursue an independent program created by winners themselves.

Two students won the award in 2007 because the committee realized it had enough funding, but it was not announced at the opening of the applications that two awards would be granted. Between 2008 and 2011, only one award was granted due to the financial crisis and sluggish economy, according to Scholarship adviser David Loevner ’76.

Thirty seniors applied to the Sachs Scholarship at Worcester College and 13 applied to the Sachs Global Scholarship, Loevner said.

She has been editor-in-chief of the Nassau Literary Review for the past two years and has worked toward restructuring the organization.

Tam is also a research assistant in psychology department chair Deborah Prentice’s lab studying social norms. She is currently working on a project involving social norms and the hookup culture at the University, an idea she got while working on a final paper for a psychology of gender course.

Stouffer, a B.S.E. candidate concentrating in computer science, said she plans to use her scholarship to work at K-RITH, an HIV and tuberculosis research institute in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa.

“So many people in the area are treated with drugs for tuberculosis, and it can take up to eight weeks for them to be effectively treated because the initial drugs don’t work,” she said.

She said she hopes to use machine-learning techniques, similar to those used by Netflix to predict users’ probable movie choices, to forecast to which drugs the strain of tuberculosis bacteria found in KwaZulu-Natal is resistant, which will make it easier to administer effective medicine sooner.

During her time at the University, Stouffer has worked as the co-president of Princeton Women in Computer Science and was a member of the Tapcats.

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“Kaitlin is definitely deserving,” PWiCS co-president Amy Ousterhout ’13 said. “I know she is so excited about the project and has been working a lot with people at the Institute in South Africa in preparation for it.”

Ousterhout is also the web editor for The Daily Princetonian.

After her work in South Africa, Stouffer also said she plans to return to the United States to pursue a medical degree and a Ph.D. in computer science.

Both Tam and Stouffer won the Shapiro Prize for Academic Excellence their freshman and sophomore years. Tam also won the Class of 1870 Sophomore and Junior English Prizes, and Stouffer was awarded the Accenture Prize in Computer Science.

In past years, the Sachs Scholarship has sponsored one University student to study at either Worcester College, Oxford or another foreign university.

The scholarship was started in honor of Daniel M. Sachs ’60, a student with a passion for politics who died in 1967. His friends and family founded the scholarship to cultivate the development of students who wanted to use their ideas and work to serve the public good.

Correction: Due to a reporting error, a previous version of this article misstated the last name of one of the Sachs winners in one instance. Stephanie Tam '13 received the Sachs Scholarship at Worcester College, University of Oxford. The 'Prince' regrets the error.