Two students awarded Chicago Consular Corps Scholarships
Two students from the Department of Civil and Materials Engineering were awarded Chicago Consular Corps Scholarship for the academic year 2016-2017 from UIC’s Office of International Affairs (OIA).
Civil engineering students Negar Kamali Zonouzi and Herbert Nuwaba were honored at OIA’s award ceremony on Nov. 17 at UIC. The ceremony marked the Chicago Consular Corps Scholarship’s 10th anniversary at UIC.
The students are two of only 15 successful applicants university-wide who were “favorably reviewed” and awarded the $1,000 scholarship. They also are among the thirteen UIC international degree seeking students who were awarded the scholarships. Two scholarships were awarded to full-time, degree seeking American students. Eligibility for the scholarship is limited to students who have a minimum cumulative UIC GPA of 3.5 (on a 4-point scale).
Zonouzi, of Iran, is working on her Ph.D., under the direction of Professor Sheng-Wei Chi in the Computational Mechanics Laboratory.
“Negar is a disciplined, mature, and intelligent graduate student. She excelled in classes and has substantial research accomplishments. Additional to classroom work and research, Negar Kamali has been actively mentoring undergraduate research,” said Chi. “She has well-rounded personality and kindness to help others. She is passionate to engage with women’s engineering society despite her already over-loaded duties and research activities. She is always eager to share her own experiences without reservation to women students in STEP in regards to classroom study and research.”
She is one of three students in Chi’s lab, and the second in his group to win the scholarship. Thanakorn Siriakorn won the same scholarship last year.
Nuwaba, of Uganda, is an undergraduate student pursuing a bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering. He recently completed a summer internship in a research laboratory at UIC where he worked with graduate student Nima Golshani.
“Doing research is something I love partly because my dad is a botanist and, so I grew up in a research environment,” said Nuwaba. “I’m Interested in a challenging position in a high-quality engineering environment where my resourceful experience and academic skills will add value to the organization and eventually help me improve the third world country infrastructure. I felt that research helped me gain experience on how I could possibly improve evacuation systems in third world countries like Uganda where I grew up.”