News & EventsSenior and Young Alum Win Scholarships for Graduate Study

Creative Solutions to Change the World

Dakota Foster ’18 forges ahead on a path she made while at Amherst, now as a Knight-Hennessy Scholar at Stanford University.

The Brunswick, Maine, native plans to pursue a graduate degree at Stanford Law on her scholarship.

A double major in political science and Asian languages and civilizations at Amherst, Foster was a 2018 recipient of a Marshall Scholarship, which funds graduate study for American students in the United Kingdom.

On the Marshall Scholarship, she earned a master’s degree in war studies at King’s College London and is now working on a master’s in global governance and diplomacy from the University of Oxford.

Foster was a visiting researcher at the Center for Security and Emerging Technology and a fellow on Elizabeth Warren’s 2020 presidential campaign. She interned for the foreign affairs committee of the U.S. House of Representatives, the U.S. Army’s Combatting Terrorism Center and the Washington Institute. At Amherst, she co-captained women’s lacrosse and was co-president of the Amherst Political Union.

Established in 2016, the Knight-Hennessy Scholars Program aims to “prepare a new generation of leaders with a deep academic foundation and the broad skill set to develop creative solutions to effect positive change in the world.” It covers the cost of a graduate degree at the Stanford.

Amherst has had one other Knight-Hennessy scholar, Matthew DeButts '14, and two finalists, Roger Creel '13 and Richard Altieri '15.

Beautiful Patterns, Deceptively Deep Problems

Joseph Lupo ’20, a double major in math and computer science, was awarded a Saint Andrew's Society of the State of New York Scholarship to attend graduate school in Scotland. He has applied for a master's in high-performance computing at the University of Edinburgh. 

“I am particularly interested in computational number theory, which is at its core the wonderful idea that computers can help us get a handle on the deceptively deep problems often found in number theory, a mathematical field dating back to antiquity that is broadly concerned with the properties of integers and prime numbers,” he wrote in his application. “I find myself wanting to understand the beautiful patterns and phenomena that inflamed the minds of generations of mathematicians before me.”

Lupo hopes to ultimately pursue a Ph.D. in pure mathematics and enter academia as a research mathematician.

Since 1956, the now 250-year-old Saint Andrew's Society of the State of New York has awarded graduate scholarships to people of Scottish descent. Two each year go to Scottish students to study in the United States, and three go to Scottish-American students to study at any university in Scotland. The scholarship pays $35,000 to be used for tuition, board, transportation and other expenses.

Previous Amherst recipients include Beth Russel ’87 and David Kirk ’90.