Amity Regional High School seniors Sivan Battat and Jenny Liu were among six students to receive 2011 Milton Fisher Scholarships for Innovation and Creativity, an annual award administered by the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven on behalf of the Renée B. Fisher Foundation.
The scholarship provides up to $20,000 to “exceptionally innovative and creative” high school juniors, seniors, and college freshmen from Connecticut and the New York Metropolitan area or those from beyond that region who plan to enroll at a Connecticut or New York Metropolitan-area college or university, according to the Renée B. Fisher Foundation website.
Language on that website describes the Milton Fisher Scholarship thus: “This scholarship is not a traditional scholarship focused on rewarding academic achievement and financial need. Its specific goal is to reward and encourage innovative and creative problem solving.”
According to a scholarship announcement on the Community Foundation’s website, Battat, who is also a student at ACES Educational Center for the Arts, received a scholarship based on her creation of Forever Running, a play based on interviews with survivors of the Holocaust and the genocide in Darfur, Sudan.
Battat “wrote and produced” the work, the announcement explains, “as a vehicle for increasing young people’s awareness of genocide. The play melded perspectives rooted in the Holocaust with perspectives drawn from contemporary violence in Darfur to dramatize the pain and suffering of the victims of genocide.”
Liu’s award was based on her work with robots.
Liu’s “research demonstrated that robots that expressed consistent and coherent emotions were able to elicit more and better feedback from human users,” the announcement explains. “Her discovery that endowing robots with believable emotional responses can add significantly to the time and energy their human teachers are willing to give them has important implications for the field of social robotics.”
Battat and Liu plan to enroll next year at Wesleyan University and Harvard College, respectively.
Other Milton Fisher Scholarship recipients were Emily Briere, a senior at E.O. Smith High School in Storrs, Anca Dogaroiu, a senior at Stuyvesant High School in New York City, Omar Sobh, a senior at Shelton High School, and Peter Zhan, a senior at Aragon High School in San Mateo, Calif., who plans to enroll next year at Yale University.
Claire Pershan, a senior at the Hopkins School in New Haven, and Joel Suarez, a senior at New Haven’s Cooperative Arts and Humanities High School, received honorable mentions from the Renée B. Fisher Foundation, as did Titiana Green, a senior at Central High School in Bridgeport, and Siying Qu, a senior at the Arendell Parrott Academy in Kinston, N.C., who plans to enroll next year at Parsons The New School for Design in New York City.
Eligible students can download applications for 2012 Milton Fisher Scholarships here.