Wall of Scholars

More than five dozen students were honored for exceptional scholarship on May 14 in Leavey Library, where their names will soon be etched in glass on the Wall of Scholars.

Many of those students were from USC Dornsife.

Surrounded by the names of past honorees, USC President C. L. Max Nikias, USC Libraries Dean Catherine Quinlan and Skull and Dagger Society President Jerry Papazian joined hundreds of family members, friends, faculty and staff in congratulating the graduating students in the annual Wall of Scholars ceremony.

The Skull and Dagger Society, USC’s oldest honor society, created the Wall of Scholars in 1995. Each spring, the names of students who have been awarded a national or international scholarship or who have earned certain USC academic accolades are added to the wall’s glass panels in the library’s Weingart Reading Room.

Papazian welcomed the crowd and secured a round of applause “for a group that rarely gets acknowledged publicly: the parents and other family members who have been so supportive to our students.”

Nikias called the students’ inclusion on the Wall of Scholars “a tremendous tribute to your exceptional talents, your passion for knowledge and your dedication to scholarship.”

“You are now part of a very select group of outstanding students whose accomplishments will always be recorded in this prominent place,” Nikias said.

“When you return to campus in a few months or a few years or a few decades, you can always return to this place in this room. And when you do, you can proudly show your friends and your families, and even your own children or grandchildren that you have a special place in the history of academic excellence in this university.”

Quinlan noted that Leavey Library, which students visit more than a million times each year, is a fitting place to honor the academic success of USC students.

“This is our only library that is open 24 hours a day, so I know that many of the students with us today know this library particularly well,” she said. “The Weingart Reading Room is one of our most popular study places on campus, and if you walk through at three o’clock in the morning, it is full. That’s a testament to the quality of our students, and why we are honoring so many today.”

These are the 2014 Wall of Scholars honorees:

• Valedictorian: Jana Hollis Shapiro
• Salutatorians: Brian Lentz, Jared Todd Sokol
• University Trustees Award: Patrick Atchison, Benjamin Diaz, Reid Lidow, Aaron Lieberman, Brandon Martinez Jr., Adeel Mohammadi, Awadi Rathugamage
• Emma Josephine Bradley Bovard Award: Grace Chediak, Ellen Feldman, Anjlie Gupta, Julia Lazzari-Dean, Mabel Wing-Nam Tsui, Kaitlyn Mei Ann Yim
• Rockwell Dennis Hunt Scholastic Award: Joseph Cline Bebel
• Truman Scholarship: Oscar de los Santos
• Gates Cambridge Scholarship: Reid Lidow
• Goldwater Scholarship: Luke Bouma
• Boren Scholarship: Kayla Foster, Greg Garcia, Benjamin Miles, Linda Wang
• Fulbright Graduate Study and Research Abroad Grants: Marguerite Bowen, Fan Fan, Samantha Freitag, John Hernandez, Brendan McMahon, Diem-Tran (Bijou) Nguyen, Rebecca Ryan, Sarah Tomlinson, Matthew Wong
• Andrew W. Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowships: Anneleise Azua, Kalena Giessler, Karissa Masciel, Adeel Mohammadi, Megan Nathan, Jasmine Torres, Vivian Yan
• Steven and Kathryn Sample Renaissance Scholar Prize: Kausar Ali, Claire Bazley, Morgan Cheeks, Brendan Colvert, Grant Dixon, Brandon Martinez Jr., Karissa Masciel, Adeel Mohammadi, Kaitlyn Yim, Alyssa Zhou
• Global Scholar Prize: Jessica Friedmann, Zachary Gima, Alice Hall-Partyka, Emily Holmes Katherine Kelsh, Jorge Perez, Laura Pochowski, Nora Snyder, Anish Tilak, Tatumn Walter
• Discovery Scholar Prize: Michael Bertch, Peter Cameron, Brandon Glousman, Richelle Gribble, Saad Haddad, Julia Lazzari-Dean, Matthew Orr, Carlos Portela, Kevin Reinhardt, Tiffany Wang
• Dean Joan Metcalf Schaefer Scholarship: Kelly Belter, Leslie Chang, Kalai Chik, Ehrenstrom Elder, Nicole Hamasaki, Hanna Jolkovsky, Esther Jiho Lee, Megan McKenzie, John Merritt, Michelle Prestholt, Camille Saucier
• J. Wesley Robb Endowed Scholarship in Human Values: Mathew Goldstein, Carolyn Windler
• Arnold S. Dunn Renaissance Scholarship for the Sciences, Arts, and Humanities: Mackenzie Darr Postel