May 5, 2006
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417
AMHERST, Mass.—Adam Lewkowitz, a senior at Amherst College, has been awarded a J. William Fulbright Fellowship for postgraduate study in Mexico. Lewkowitz, a graduate of the Phoenix Country Day School, is the son of Herman and Catherine Lewkowitz of Phoenix, Ariz.
A sociology and Spanish major at Amherst, Lewkowitz wrote in his Fulbright proposal that he hopes to continue in Mexico the work he began in Arizona for his honors thesis, in which he examined the question, do “social stigmas within Mexican communities affect the process of assimilation?” At Tijuana’s El Collegio de la Frontera Norte, the leading Mexican university in border relations, he will try to discover if “the aversion to becoming Americanized stems from Mexican society.”
At Amherst, Lewkowitz was not only an outstanding swimmer and captain of the team. He was one of 27 students from across the country selected for the Mount Sinai School of Medicine Humanities and Medicine Program, a preliminary acceptance to medical school that will enable him to fulfill his vocational dream of becoming a doctor while pursuing a passion for the humanities as an undergraduate. Lewkowitz expects to receive his M.D. degree in 2011, and also to earn a Masters of Public Health degree. He hopes to return to Phoenix to work as a physician in a bilingual community.
Congress created the Fulbright Program in 1946 to foster mutual understanding among nations through educational and cultural exchanges. Senator J. William Fulbright, sponsor of the legislation, viewed scholarship as an alternative to armed conflict. Today the Fulbright Program, the federal government’s premier scholarship program, funded by an annual Congressional appropriation and contributions from other participating countries, allows Americans to study or conduct research in more than 100 nations.
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