The Office of Graduate Education and Life has announced the 2022 WVU Foundation Scholarship recipients. Four doctoral students are recipients of the WVU Foundation Distinguished Doctoral Scholarship and five master’s students have been selected to receive the Carl del Signore Foundation Scholarship.
These awards have been set up to help students defray the costs of their last year of graduate studies while allowing them to focus on completing their theses or dissertations.
WVU Distinguished Doctoral Scholarship Awardees
Joshua H. Karr
Fairview, West Virginia
College of Education and Human Services
Ph.D., Educational Theory and Practice
“This award will be instrumental for my research, teaching, and daily life. As a teacher educator, my research and teaching are extremely intertwined and this scholarship will help me in funding opportunities for sharing and distributing my work. This will reciprocally help me in my own development, and also in the preparation of future secondary math and science teachers – exponentially increasing the award’s impact. Finally, the scholarship will assist in offsetting daily expenses for my family and allow us to spend some quality time together.”
Nicole Mihalik
Johnstown, Pennsylvania
School of Medicine
Ph.D., Immunology and Microbial Pathogenesis
"I am very humbled and grateful to have received this scholarship. This award will help defray educational costs while allowing me to focus on my dissertation research in the cancer immunology field. Specifically, this honor will help me further pursue therapeutic targeting of a type of immune cell in breast tumors, known as macrophages, to help re-shape the breast tumor microenvironment to be better suited for immunotherapy. I hope this work may someday positively impact the lives of cancer patients and will help me reach my career goal of being a cancer immunologist. "
Kelly L. Monaghan
Dallas, Pennsylvania
School of Medicine/Biomedical Sciences
Ph.D., Immunology and Microbial Pathogenesis
“I am honored to accept the WVU Foundation Distinguished Doctoral Scholarship. I would like to extend my sincerest appreciation and thanks to the WVU Foundation and the Office of Graduate Education and Life for this prestigious award. This scholarship will be instrumental in facilitating the completion of my dissertation work, which seeks to provide insight into the immune mechanisms that govern multiple sclerosis pathogenesis. By better understanding of these immune mechanisms, we hope to inform novel therapies for the treatment of multiple sclerosis. Additionally, support from this award will assist in defraying the cost of travel to conferences where I will have the opportunity to share my work and identify a laboratory where I hope to complete my postdoctoral training. My career ambition is to become an independent immunologist, and this award will greatly support my progress towards this goal.”
Gabriella Pishotti
Warren, Ohio
Eberly College of Arts and Sciences
Ph.D., English
“I am so grateful and honored to have been selected as a recipient of the WVU Foundation Distinguished Doctoral Scholarship. For me, this award will help to defray the financial costs of graduate student life and professional development opportunities. It also is so encouraging because it shows that the university sees value in my dissertation project in which I explore how literary representations of survival migrants, especially amidst the current refugee crisis, help to foster connection over others.”
Carl del Signore Foundation Scholarship Awardees
Stephanie Augustine
Palmerton, Pennsylvania
Davis College of Agriculture, Natural Resources and Design
M.S., Wildlife and Fisheries Resources
“I am honored and grateful to receive the Carl del Signore Foundation Scholarship which has helped to offset the extreme financial burden resulting from diminished funding during the ongoing pandemic. With this support, I will be completing my thesis this semester studying the population dynamics and migration ecology of the charismatic declining songbird, the Canada Warbler, in the rugged high elevations and unique ecology of central Appalachia in the Monongahela National Forest.”
Lindsey Aman Cromwell
Johnstown, Pennsylvania
Eberly College of Arts and Sciences
M.S., Geology
“I am extremely grateful to have been awarded the Carl del Signore Scholarship. This semester, I am concluding my thesis investigating groundwater movement within Arctic environments and this scholarship will aid in my goal to publish my findings. I look forward to applying the skills I have learned during my master's education here at WVU to my research as a Ph.D. student next year.”
Stephanie M. House-Niamke
Roanoke, Virginia
Eberly College of Arts and Sciences
M.A., Sociology, Race Gender and Religion
“As an out-of-state student, this scholarship is helping me to put more focus into my research project and completing my thesis for which I am extremely grateful. This thesis will hopefully offer some insight into the Black Christian community in ways that will provide some more direction for social change within religious and racially minoritized communities. Thank you for the opportunity to do this work.”
Montgomery Owsiany
Saint Clair Shores, Michigan
Eberly College of Arts and Sciences
Ph.D., Clinical Psychology
“I am truly honored to receive the Carl del Signore Scholarship. This award will support my master's thesis that investigates the age invariance of the Male Depression Risk Scale in young and older U.S. adult samples. The award will allow me to expand the scope of the project and have a bigger impact on the growing field of masculine depression.”
Sarah Woolard
Washington, North Carolina
Eberly College of Arts and Sciences
M.A., Geography, GIS and Spatial Analysis
“It is a great honor to be selected as a recipient of the Carl del Signore Foundation Scholarship. This award will relieve educational costs and allow for more focus towards my thesis research on exploring spatial patterns of maternal morbidity in West Virginia. It will also support identification of spatial relationships between maternal morbidity trends, access to health care sites, and community-level characteristics. Through this research, I hope to contribute to public health initiatives which will alleviate maternal morbidity risks and improve access to pregnancy-related health care in West Virginia."
For more information, contact Betty Mei at bmei@mail.wvu.edu.