Shaw Center Stories

Leadership Intern Iona Volynets Selected as 2023 Truman Scholar

Syracuse University junior Iona Volynets has been named as a 2023 recipient of the Truman Scholarship.

Volynets, of Washington, D.C., is a history and international relations major in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs and College of Arts and Sciences with a museum studies minor in the College of Visual and Performing Arts, a Coronat Scholar and a member of the Renée Crown University Honors Program. In October 2022, Volynets was named as one of three Syracuse recipients of the Voyager Scholarship: the Obama-Chesky Scholarship for Public Service, a new award for juniors committed to public service funded by the Obama Foundation.
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Zoe Rennock ’24 Partners With Bioengineering as an Inclusive Education Consultant through PIE

Group projects are critical to the applied learning that takes places across the University campus, and not least to the Bioengineering Capstone Design course led by Pun To (Douglas) Yung, associate teaching professor in the College of Engineering and Computer Science.

Yung’s course asks student teams to develop real-world solutions to biomedical challenges, taking them from concept through prototype design. It can be a challenging environment.
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Shaw Center Alumni Anna Poe Selected as Fulbright Recipient

The U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs on Feb. 10 named Syracuse University a Fulbright Top Producing Institution for U.S. students. This recognition is given to the U.S. colleges and universities that received the highest number of applicants selected for the 2022-23 Fulbright U.S. Student Program cohort.
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Shaw Center Leadership Intern and Lender Center Student Fellow Nadia Larissa Lyngdoh-Sommer Involved in Social Justice AI Research

These days, it’s hard to go anywhere without encountering artificial intelligence (AI).

Predictive text offers to finish our web searches and our text messages. AI learning-based software can produce everything from research papers to poetry, solving complex math equations to writing computer code. AI can be used to write algorithms, collect data on which areas experience the most gun violence and dictate which neighborhoods receive access to vital resources.

This year, five students who make up the 2022-24 Lender Center for Social Justice Fellowship Project will set out to investigate how AI weapons systems transform war and surveillance, and they will also analyze how AI accentuates our social and political vulnerabilities to violence.
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