Rice senior a Rhodes Scholar
Her sights are set on defeating tuberculosis, a killer of millionsSarah Raslan
Houston Chronicle
As if Ye jin Kang's résumé wasn't impressive enough, the 22-year-old Rice University senior found out this weekend she has another entry to add: Rhodes Scholar.
Kang is among 32 U.S. students and 80 worldwide receiving prestigious Rhodes scholarships to study at the University of Oxford in London for two years, starting next fall. The Houstonian was one of 13 Texas nominees interviewed by the Rhodes Trust.
"It will help me build the academic foundation necessary to address the issues I care about," said Kang, who was born in South Korea and moved to Houston at age 2.
Kang — who loves soccer, Harry Potter and her mother's cooking — graduated from Cypress Falls High School. Granted American citizenship in February, she's now majoring in ecology and evolutionary biology, along with policy studies in global health.
She plans on pursuing two masters degrees at Oxford: one in global health science and the other in global governance. She hopes this will bring her closer to her goal of eliminating tuberculosis, a contagious disease that killed an estimated 1.7 million people in 2009.
"I want to tackle tuberculosis," said Kang, who hopes to join the World Health Organization. "I'm going to Oxford to do that. I want to study the whole process from start to finish to make sure what is developed is actually implemented."
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