Backus

Haring-Smith

PROVIDENCE — Two college students with ties to Rhode Island and eclectic life experiences have been selected as Rhodes Scholars and will begin graduate studies at Oxford University in England next fall.

Brown University senior Keriann Backus, and Whitney Haring-Smith, a senior at Yale University who grew up in Providence and attended the Wheeler School, are two of the 32 students from the United States selected by the world’s oldest fellowship program.

Backus, 21, is concentrating in chemistry and Latin American studies at Brown and plans to pursue a doctorate in chemical biology at Oxford.

“I’m trying to unite health policy and medical research,” Backus said of her diverse interests. Backus has received the Mercx Prize in organic chemistry and Brown’s Pfizer Fellowship in organic chemistry. She tutors students in science in the Providence school system.

Haring-Smith, 21, will receive both a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in political science and a graduate certificate in security studies from Yale next spring. He plans to earn a doctorate in politics at Oxford and wants to work for the federal government. Haring-Smith has been active in national and local politics. He founded a nonprofit organization, New Haven Action, last year, which promotes clean energy. The initiative earned him a Udall Scholarship for environmental leadership.

In addition to their academic accomplishments, Backus and Haring-Smith share something else: they’ve both had adventurous childhoods, filled with life experiences that have shaped them.

BACKUS, A NATIVE of Seattle, spent seven years, starting at age 7, sailing around the world with her parents and younger brother. In their 39-foot sailboat, the family explored Mexico and the Pacific Islands before staying in New Zealand for a year.

Every 18 months, the family returned to Seattle for a few months, so her parents could oversee the family real-state business and so they could visit family and friends.

When Backus was 9, the family traveled to Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Sri Lanka, then sailed to the Red Sea, to explore Yemen, Sudan, Egypt, then Cyprus and the Mediterranean Sea. Backus said she and her brother were home-schooled on the boat, but she said they learned the most from visiting museums and historic sites, and life at sea. Backus learned to snorkel and scuba dive, and helped her father repair the boat engine and the machine that converted sea water to drinking water.

The family stayed in Turkey for the summer before returning to Seattle, where Backus took up the bassoon while at a local school. Backus took the bassoon on the family’s next adventure, sailing the Mediterranean and visiting Italy and Spain. The family then flew to South Africa, visiting Botswana, Zambia and Zimbabwe before sailing to the Caribbean. The odyssey ended in Maine.

The Backuses moved back to Seattle when Keriann was 14.

“What was hard was moving back,” she said. “It was really hard learning to go to high school and to interact with kids my own age.”

“Having had such a different childhood, most people couldn’t relate to it,” she said.

To make friends, Backus joined the school orchestra and the cross-country team. She took lab sciences for the first time and found that she enjoyed them.

Backus spent several summers traveling, going to Burgos, Spain, one year to learn Spanish and to Bolivia another year to volunteer at a pet shelter, vaccinating animals against rabies.

At Brown, Backus has continued her interest in Latin America and science and has done volunteer work. Last year, she worked at health clinic in Ecuador that treated people for drug-resistant tuberculosis. And her freshman summer, she took part in a nine-week bike trip across the country to raise $6,000 for a Habitat for Humanity house in Providence.

Backus said she hopes to become a professor at a university in Washington state or the nation’s capital, where she would have access to research grants from either the Gates Foundation or the National Institutes of Health.

“My current aspiration is to become an academic adviser, deciding where money goes in terms of research,” she said. “There’s a lot of money going to key areas, like an AIDS vaccine, but there is less glamorous research that gets less attention that also needs funding.”

She credits her unusual childhood with helping her to define her path as an adult.

“I perceive it as something that catalyzed a lot of the things I do today. It was my childhood, but it also shaped the way I think about the world,” Backus said. “I guess I have a very broad perspective. It’s why I can’t just focus on basic science research, but I also am interested in health policy.”

WHITNEY HARING-SMITH attended the Wheeler School in Providence until the fifth grade. Then his family moved to Egypt for three years, when his mother, Tori Haring-Smith, a former professor of theater and English at Brown, took a job teaching at the American University in Cairo. His father, Robert Haring-Smith, is a technology consultant.

The family moved back to Providence for Haring-Smith’s first two years in high school at Wheeler. It was there, he says, he learned that students had the power to organize and work together. Haring-Smith and a group of friends started Wheeler’s Model United Nations Program.

“It let me explore my interests and take responsibility for working as a team,” Haring-Smith said. “It all started at Wheeler, honestly. It gave me the confidence to take initiative and make ideas real.”

Haring-Smith moved to Oregon about six years ago when his mother became dean of the college of liberal arts at Willamette University; she is now president of Washington & Jefferson College in Pennsylvania.

But his experience at Wheeler has guided him in college and in his work as a political volunteer, Haring-Smith said.

He attended the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, South Africa, as a high school senior, and the summer after his freshman year at Yale he served as an intern with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, working in Sri Lanka.

“I wanted to learn about humanitarian affairs on the ground,” he said. Yale provided travel expenses and a small stipend.

The next summer, Haring-Smith worked in Washington, D.C., assisting the deputy assistant secretary of defense for Western Hemisphere affairs, and traveled to Paraguay with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on a classified project.

Last summer, Haring-Smith worked for the United Nations in Afghanistan, collecting illegal ammunition in 10 provinces.

He has also volunteered for national and local political campaigns and causes, including working in Iowa as an unpaid intern for the John Kerry presidential campaign.BACKUS AND Haring-Smith were selected from about 900 scholars from 340 colleges and universities and will join scholars from other parts of the world. About 85 Rhodes Scholars will enter Oxford in October 2007 for two or three years of study. The scholarships are valued at about $45,000 a year.

Rhodes scholarships were created in 1902 by the will of British philanthropist Cecil Rhodes. Famous American Rhodes Scholars include former President Bill Clinton and former U.S. senator and presidential candidate Bill Bradley.

Material from the Associated Press was used in this report.