Yaniv Barzilai of Charlotte, a rising junior in UNC's College of Arts and Sciences, has received a Thomas R. Pickering Undergraduate Foreign Affairs Fellowship from the U.S. Department of State.
The fellowship will fund his junior and senior years at Carolina; the first year of graduate school in pursuit of a master’s degree in international affairs; two internships with the State Department and a 4.5-year commitment as a foreign service officer, or diplomat.
Barzilai was one of 20 fellows selected nationwide from among hundreds of applicants for the undergraduate fellowship, which is administered by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. The value of the fellowship varies as widely as the schools attended by the recipients.
Barzilai is a public service scholar, meaning that he is on track to perform more than 300 hours of community service while at Carolina. An honors student, he is majoring in peace, war and defense and history, with a minor in Arabic.
While still a student at Charlotte’s Myers Park High School, Barzilai studied effects of prenatal cocaine exposure at the neurodevelopmental psychology lab in Carolinas Medical Center in Charlotte. He published an algorithm for identifying cocaine exposure in infants.
As a freshman at UNC, Barzilai received the James and Florence Peacock Fellowship to travel to Kenya and intern with Carolina for Kibera, an organization based in UNC’s Center for Global Initiatives. The organization fights poverty and helps prevent violence through community-based development in the Kibera slum of Nairobi, Kenya. Barzilai returned from Kenya to become a program officer with Carolina For Kibera, leading student involvement in the organization.
During his sophomore year at UNC, Barzilai became a Thai Heels Teaching Fellow and traveled to Thailand for an internship with the Population and Community Development Association. Barzilai is spending the summer of 2009 traveling through Southeast Asia. Follow his adventures via his blog: http://ymbarzilai.blogspot.com/.
The Pickering Undergraduate Foreign Affairs Fellowship seeks to recruit talented students in academic programs relevant to international affairs, political and economic analysis, administration, management and science policy. The program’s goal is to attract outstanding students from all ethnic, racial and social backgrounds who are interested in pursuing foreign service careers in the State Department.
