Rhodes Scholars include 6 from Great Lakes area

Nov. 23--Half a dozen students from the Great Lakes region were among 32 Americans selected as Rhodes scholars, officials announced this weekend.

The scholars were chosen out of a field of more than 200 U.S. finalists from 86 colleges and universities. The scholarships pay all expenses for two or three years of study at the University of Oxford in England.

Rachel Harmon, of Champaign, studies industrial and labor relations at Cornell University. Prior to college, Harmon volunteered for AmeriCorps as a reading tutor for students at an all-black rural elementary school in the Mississippi Delta. This experience has "fueled her motivation" to study socioeconomics, according to a Rhodes Scholar press release.

While at Cornell, Harmon was an intern for the Southern Education Foundation and taught at a maximum security prison and in a juvenile detention center. At Oxford, she plans to study evidence-based social policy.

Columbus, Ohio native Alexander Coccia graduated from the University of Notre Dame in May, where he studied Africana studies and peace studies. Coccia is currently a Truman-Albright fellow in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

At Notre Dame, he served as student body president and led a movement to create a more welcoming environment for gay and lesbian students. Coccia plans to study comparative social policy at Oxford.

Jacob Burnett, of Mishawaka, Ind., is a political science major at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Ind.. Burnett has done research on transnational crime, sub-Saharan political leadership and poverty in the Appalachia region and held leadership roles on the student newspaper and campus political groups.

Burnett, who worked at the Legal Aid Society in Kentucky and interned with the Public Defender Service in Washington, D.C., plans to pursue his interest in criminal justice through Oxford's criminology and criminal justice master's program.

Tayo Sanders II, of Neenah, Wis., studies material science at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire and has done research in nanotechnology and presented at the American Chemical Society. At Oxford, Sanders plans to continue his studies of materials in the doctoral research program.

David Moore, a native of Holland, Mich., received a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering in May at the University of Michigan, where he is pursuing his master's degree in the subject. Moore, a student-athlete and former captain of the men's varsity swim team, plans to study computer science.

Rebecca Esselstein is a Dayton, Ohio native and a senior at the U.S. Air Force Academy, where she studies astronautical engineering. An aspiring astronaut, Esselstein will pursue a doctoral degree in astrophysics at Oxford.

Yale had the most Rhodes Scholars with 4. Brown, MIT and Princeton each had 3, and Harvard and Stanford had two apiece.