Each year, Barnard students and alumnae earn awards, fellowships, and scholarships that allow them to elevate their intellectual curiosity and academic success. From the natural sciences to economy, history, and law, students created innovative projects and theses and were able to distinguish themselves from thousands of applicants to receive support for their work.
Scholarships that have been granted to outstanding Barnard students in the 2022-2023 academic year include:
- Projects for Peace
- The Mitchell Scholarship
- Barry Goldwater Scholarship
- National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program
- Paul Duby Research Award in Electrochemistry
- PIMCO Future Leaders Scholarship
Read below to learn more about the recipients, their academic backgrounds, and their diverse sets of expertise.
Layne Donovan ’23 | Projects for Peace
The graduating history major has a strong passion for reproductive justice and the liberation of knowledge as an act of resistance. Donovan’s senior thesis focused on the history of medication abortion in the 19th-century United States and the importance of noninstitutional knowledge of reproductive healthcare. With her grant, Donovan will work on “Project Access: Wisconsin” — a growing set of patient guides for low-income Wisconsinites who seek publicly funded contraceptives. Her short-term goal is to make accessing contraception easier for lower-income-earning Wisconsinites. In the long term, Donovan hopes to learn about current and former policies around contraceptives in Wisconsin and work with providers and patients to spread this knowledge.
“This work is especially important now as abortion in Wisconsin has become illegal in nearly all circumstances and access to contraceptives for low-income people has become dramatically restricted in recent years,” said Donovan.
Kaitlin Long ’24 | Goldwater Scholarship
Kaitlin Long, a junior majoring in computational biology, was selected for the Goldwater Scholarship to help finance her final year at Barnard, after which she will pursue a doctorate in cancer biology. Long has spent her time at the College researching how cancer drugs kill cells, in the lab of Jason Sheltzer at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and at Yale University. She also works alongside Carol Prives in the department of biological sciences at Columbia. Long’s senior thesis will focus on how the cancer-promoting protein MDM2 affects the tumor suppressor protein p73. With a passion for the field, Long hopes to explore cancer cell death pathways in her future study.
Naiara A. Munich ’23 | National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program (NSF GRFP);
Paul Duby Research Award in Electrochemistry
Naiara A. Munich graduates this spring with a major in chemistry and a minor in mathematical sciences. She will begin her Ph.D. in chemical engineering at the California Institute of Technology this fall. Munich’s extensive research experiences include battery research in the Marbella lab at Columbia Engineering and the Columbia Electrochemical Energy Center. Munich’s NSF GRFP grant will fund her graduate research for the next three years as she continues her work in electrochemistry that focuses on sustainability. As a recipient of the Paul Duby Research Award in Electrochemistry, Munich is interested in the industry of clean energy technologies.
Paloma La Valley ’25 | PIMCO Future Leaders Scholarship
Paloma La Valley is a sophomore majoring in political science and minoring in economics and Spanish and Latin American studies. Selected from 2,200 applicants, she is one of 50 recipients of the 2023 PIMCO Future Leaders Scholarship — and the inaugural recipient at Barnard. As an outreach intern for the U.S. Senate in New York City, La Valley plans to pursue a dual JD/MBA program in the future. She will use the PIMCO scholarship to explore her passion for venture capital.
“I love the idea of actively advising and strategizing with teams to help materialize their dream, bringing their personal ambitions to fruition,” said La Valley.
Nami Weatherby ’23 | Projects for Peace
Weatherby majored in sociology and music at Barnard. With the Projects for Peace grant, she will travel home to Japan to put on a multimodal sound installation titled “They Never Told Us These Things.” The installation explores the networked experiences of colonized and racialized peoples affected by the U.S. nuclear weapons project.
“It means the world to have the opportunity to take this project I developed here at [Barnard] and to trace irradiated lines [while] traveling across the ocean to present the work in my home country to an audience for whom the content matter is tangibly in recent memory,” said Weatherby.