Two Yale seniors — one who has already distinguished herself as a researcher in the evolution of bird vision and another devoted to a study of the Bolivian labor movement — are among the 37 students nationwide to be awarded Marshall Scholarships for 2008.

Mary Caswell (Cassie) Stoddard of Alexandria, Virginia, and Sabrina Snell from Washington, D.C., received the prestigious scholarships, which are given to outstanding American students for two years of study in the United Kingdom.

One of three Yale recipients of a Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship for 2007-2008 and a member of Phi Beta Kappa, Stoddard is a biology major. In 2006, she presented her findings on avian color research at the North American Ornithological Conference in Veracruz, Mexico, and she recently co-authored a paper with Yale Professor Richard Prum, in whose ornithological lab she works. With a National Science Foundation REU Fellowship, she spent 10 weeks this past summer at Shoals Marine Laboratory on Appledore Island off the coast of Maine doing research on gull behavior and ecology.

In addition to her academic achievements, Stoddard has pursued a number of extracurricular interests and is a leader in community affairs. She is an accomplished musician, who plays first violin in the Yale Symphony Orchestra. As a junior, she founded the Yale Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Undergraduate Group (YEEBUG), an official University organization open to all undergraduates interested in the natural sciences. The organization hosts student-faculty dinners and special tours, and actively promotes undergraduate involvement in the New Haven community, largely through volunteer work at Yale’s Peabody Museum of Natural History. In the summer of 2006, Stoddard was selected to attend an international conference in France on peace, human rights and the environment.

Stoddard will receive her B.S. in May. She looks forward, she says, to using her Marshall Scholarship to pursue ornithology research at the University of Cambridge in the Department of Zoology.

An anthropology major, Snell has already spent several years in the field studying the political evolution of the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) in Bolivia. She became fascinated by the labor movement in that country — which, she notes, is the poorest in South America — when she spent the year between high school and college there as an exchange student with the American Field Service Intercultural Program. Although she originally planned to study astronomy when she came to Yale, she says she soon shifted her focus to the tumultuous political history of Bolivia, a country that has experienced 190 coups d’etat in its 200 years of independence.

Snell, who will receive both master’s and bachelor’s degrees when she graduates in May, is doing her senior project specifically on how unionism in Bolivia “transformed into political activism.” Having spent two out of the three summers of her Yale years in Bolivia conducting research — which included an interview with the current president of Bolivia when he was a candidate —Snell has created a comprehensive “ethnography,” which, she explains, is a holistic study of a social group in its historical, economic, cultural, environmental and geographical context. This multidisciplinary approach to understanding the evolution of social and political movements is the hallmark of the Institute for Development Studies at the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom, where Snell intends to earn her M.Phil. degree with her Marshall Scholarship. She hopes to become a consultant on policy issues.

Snell’s extracurricular activities have included tutoring children in the bilingual J.C. Daniels public elementary school in New Haven.

The highly competitive Marshall Scholarships were established by the British Parliament in recognition of the Marshall Plan, which helped Europe recover from the devastation of World War II.

It was previously announced that two other Yale students will study in Britain as recipients of Rhodes Scholarships for 2008.

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• Victor Vroom is named the inaugural BearingPoint Professor
  
  
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