Harry McNamara
Noteworthy: The U.S. State Department recently awarded McNamara one of 12 George E. Mitchell Scholarships for 2014 for graduate study in Ireland or Northern Ireland. He will study neuroscience at Trinity College in Dublin.
Age: 24
Residence: Peters
Family: Father, Dennis; mother, Cathy; two sisters and one brother
Occupation: Graduate student completing work for a master's of philosophy degree in mirco- and nanotechnology enterprise at Cambridge University in England, which he is attending on a Cambridge-Gates scholarship.
Education: McNamara earned a bachelor of science in physics and bachelor of arts in ethics, politics and economics from Yale in 2011.
Background: McNamara, who plans to pursue a doctorate in physics, previously worked with a company developing devices in medical imaging and as a researcher on meteors at Los Alamos National Laboratory. A student of Arabic, he served as an English translator for Iraqi refugee families in Amman, Jordan, and was a community liaison for an Iraqi refugee family in New Haven, Conn., while attending Yale.
Quote: “Most of my motivation for doing the Mitchell Scholarship at Trinity College is academically it's a very good fit for the type of research I want to do. It's also an opportunity for me to make a meaningful connection to this part of the world and my family heritage.”
