Daniela Búcaro Candel (FANTEL, El Salvador, B.A., 2004, international business, John Brown Univ.) won the Arkansas Governor’s Award for Entrepreneurial Development in April 2004. Bucaro and three John Brown Univ. teammates (M. Tice, S. Chess, and S. Malley) received a $20,000 award from Governor Mike Huckabee for the team’s plan for Nature’s Beef, an organic beef company. The students’ business plan included the company’s objective to provide customers with “beef the way nature intended” by adhering closely to the USDA’s standards for organic products, as well as a strategy for distributing Nature’s Beef through major grocery retailers.
In March 2004, Magdalena Duhagon (Fulbright, Uruguay, M.M., 2002, music, Johns Hopkins Univ., and OAS, Uruguay, graduate performance diploma, 2004, Johns Hopkins Univ.) performed guitar duets with Paraguayan Berta Rojas at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. The duo was then joined by guitarists Néstor Ausqui and Marcelo Cornut, forming the Quartetto Del Sur, who presented their arrangement of the Concierto de Aranjuez by Joaquín Rodrigo. After receiving her diploma, Duhagon toured Europe and the Middle East, performing in Lisbon, Paris, Berlin, Warsaw, Amsterdam, Cairo, Alexandria, Amman, Beirut, and Prague, where she was a soloist with the Czech Philharmonic Chamber Orchestra. She also gave master classes at the Conservatoire de Musique D’Alexandrie in Alexandria and at the Guitar Festival of Ireland in Dublin. Duhagon’s postacademic training includes leading a guitar enrichment program at Crossway Community, a non-profit agency, and serving on the faculty at the Washington Conservatory and at Middle C Music in the Washington, D.C. area. In October 2004, she performed in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she will record her first solo album in November.
Pianist Patricia Li Ran Ting (Fulbright, Argentina, M.A., 2005, music performance, Carnegie Mellon Univ.) was one of the six winners of the 2004 Pittsburgh Concert Society’s Major Audition Competition. As a winner, Li performed several recitals in the greater Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, area, including a lobby recital at Carnegie Music Hall. Also in 2004, Li was awarded a full scholarship to the Blanche Bryden Sunflower Music Institute at Washburn Univ. in Topeka, Kansas, as well as second prize in the Fourth Biennial Lee Piano Competition held at Augustana College in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
In May 2004, Manuel Ruíz Díaz (Fulbright, Colombia, M.A, 2005, psychology, Loyola Univ. Chicago) presented his paper entitled “Motivation and Language Uses in the Learning-Teaching Process” at the XIV Conference of the World Association for Educational Research in Santiago, Chile. The theme of the conference was “Educators for a New Culture.”
During her degree program, Susana María Company (Fulbright, Argentina, M.A., 2004, English literature, Univ. of Maryland, College Park) participated in two scholarly conferences. In 2003, she presented her paper, “Browning’s ‘Immoral’ Characters and Aesthetic Concerns: Three Clerical Figures that Defy Religious Didacticism” at the 13th Annual Central New York Conference on Language and Literature, organized by SUNY Cortland in Cortland, New York. In 2004, she presented her paper “Joyce Carol Oates’s Postmodern Turn of the Screw,” at the Madison Conference for graduate students of English, organized by James Madison Univ. in Harrisonburg, Virginia. While at the Univ. of Maryland, Company volunteered with the English for Speakers of Other Languages Conversation Program, where she had weekly conversational meetings with international graduate students who had difficulty expressing themselves in English.
Ingrid Lavine (Fulbright–OAS Ecology, Barbados, M.S., 2004, civil and environmental engineering, Univ. of Maine) gave a poster presentation entitled “Isolation and Characterization of an Arsenate-Reducing Bacterium from Maine Groundwater” at the 103rd General Meeting of the American Society for Microbiology in Washington, D.C. in May 2003. Lavine and her colleagues (K. McCaffery and J. MacRae) studied groundwater for signs of arsenate-reducing bacteria and then measured the effects of the bacteria on arsenic activity.
Prior to the completion of his degree, Andrés Molina Araújo (OAS, Colombia, LL.M., 2004, international business, trade, and intellectual property, Columbia Univ.) co-founded (with M. Filardi and others) a new student organization at Columbia Univ., the Columbia Comparative Criminal Law Association (CCCLA). The group’s focus is to create an adequate environment at Columbia Law School for comparative studies of criminal justice administration. As a CCCLA board member, Molina helped organize seminars and events, which featured guest speakers from Columbia and other schools as well as representatives from the U.S. Department of Justice. Currently, Molina is working as a legal adviser to the municipality of Bogota, D.C., in the negotiation of a free trade agreement between Colombia and the United States.
In 2003, Karla Sierralta León (Fulbright, Venezuela, M.A., 2004, architecture, Univ. of Illinois at Chicago) was a finalist in the World Trade Center Site Memorial Competition. The memorial will be built to commemorate the lives lost in attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City on September 11, 2001, and February 26, 1993. Sierralta and partner Brian Strawn’s design “Dual Memory” was one of the eight finalist designs chosen out of 5,201 submissions. Their design incorporated sugar maple trees planted in the soil of 92 nations to represent the shared loss, and lights and images to represent individual victims. In 2004, Sierralta and Strawn were also finalists in the Ford Calumet Environmental Center competition, an international contest to design an environmental education and research center in Chicago, Illinois. In keeping with the city’s mission for the center, Sierralta and Strawn’s design included a roof-based vegetation lab, observation area, and education space, as well as incorporating recycled and renewable materials, such as salvaged car hoods, in the exterior of the building.
In February 2004, Guillermo Yaber Oltra (FUNDAYACUCHO, Venezuela, Ph.D., 1993, psychology, Western Michigan Univ.) was appointed the Caribbean coordinator of the Institute for University Management and Leadership. The institute is one of two programs of the Inter-American Organization for Higher Education, an international university association that promotes cooperation between member institutions and fosters the development of higher education in the Americas.
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