Dharamsala, May 13 – A Tibetan student of Bowdoin College in Maine, US, has won the prestigious Keasbey Scholarship to study at England’s Oxford University.
Tenzing Tashi, a biochemistry major is one of only two students in the U.S. to receive the scholarship that is available on rotating basis to only 12 of the top colleges and universities in the United States – Amherst, Bowdoin, Brown, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Haverford, Middlebury, Princeton, Swarthmore, Wesleyan and Yale.
Tenzing has also won the Fulbright Research Grant Fellowship to conduct research in France but he declined it to accept the Keasbey scholarship.
Tenzing’s parents, Wangchuk and Sonam Chozom, live in Vacaville, California.
Tenzing plans to pursue master’s degree in pathology, and do research on the molecular biology and biochemistry of parasites.
Tenzing told the Bowdoin College Campus Newspaper, “I will be working on a parasite called Trypanosoma brucei, which causes the African sleeping sickness and claims up to half a million lives annually”.
Tenzing says there is no safe and effective drugs to treat this neglected disease. Treatments currently involve an arsenic and anti-freeze compound, which needs to be injected daily and burns through your veins, according to him. “The development of an effective drug therapy for trypanosomiasis will depend on a broader understanding of T. brucei at a molecular and cellular level. In simple terms, I will try to understand how a family of cytoskeleton-associated proteins called Cap5.5 function. This is important because if one were to knockdown a form of this protein, it becomes rapidly lethal. Therefore, Cap5.5 is an excellent target for an anti-trypanosome drug development.”
Tenzing aspires to become a physician-scientist and plans to return to the United States for his Ph.D. program with a focus on infectious diseases.
The scholarship is provided by the Griffith Keasbey and Anna Griffith Keasbey Memorial Foundation which awards the scholarships to support two years of study at selected British universities in the interest of promoting Anglo-American relations and providing Americans with an opportunity to experience the British education system.
