Scholarships bring the brighest to WA unis
As she explained the idea in somewhat casual terms, Sophie Monnier could have been talking about any workaday thing.
Geophysics, or the physics of the earth, was the subject and the crowd that had gathered around Ms Monnier was getting a crash course in how science was used to peer into it.
Only the young Frenchwoman was not talking about what lay 4km or 5km below the surface.
Rather, she was describing how science would soon be able to peer with remarkable clarity up to 150km into the earth - beyond the planet's crust.
Or at least, that was the plan.
Perhaps, unsurprisingly, it emerged yesterday that Ms Monnier was one of the five brilliant students selected to be inaugural recipients of scholarships through the foundation set up by mining billionaire Andrew Forrest and his wife Nicola.
The Forrest Research Foundation was established last year with $65 million of funding in what has been described as the biggest single philanthropic act in Australian history.
While $15 million of the donation will be used to help build a hall to accommodate recipients, the balance of $50 million has been set aside to fund scholarships and postdoctoral fellowships at all five WA universities.
Mr Forrest said he hoped the program would become a permanent part of WA's education landscape and help attract some of the world's brightest minds to the State.
"They (the recipients) could have chosen scholarships any- where in the world and it's a really great honour to WA that they chose us," Mr Forrest said.
As part of their scholarships, recipients will get an annual stipend of about $30,000, while accommodation costs of about $20,000 will also be covered.
The winners were Dulce Landin, from Mexico, who will study the epigenome in brain function; American Tim Hammer, who will study species survival of arid Australian plants; Trung Viet Nguyen from Vietnam, who will study DNA methylation in cancer development; Grace Goh from Singapore, who will study circadian rhythms and temperature in metabolic function, and Ms Monnier.
