Catherine Brewer (Gumm), a 2007 IUP Honors College Graduate, is the recipient of a 2008 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.  She will be spending her three-year tenure at Iowa State University working towards a PhD in Chemical Engineering with a minor in Biorenewable Resources Technology.  Her research, in a nutshell, is the characterization, production and engineering of bio-chars for soil amendment and carbon sequestration applications.  (In other words, she studies the different thermochemical ways of processing biomass to make charcoal, and the char's physical and agronomic properties in relation to carbon stability and soil fertility improvement.)

Gina Russo, a senior history major from Lakewood, Colorado has been awarded a 2008 Fulbright Fellowship to China. Gina has studied in China before at the University of Hong Kong when she was the recipient of a Phi Kappa Phi study abroad grant. In order to share her experiences, she kept an online travel blog.

The blog can be found at: http://realtravel.com/china-trips-i2352879.html.