Harveen Bal

Harveen Bal and Ambika Bumb are two more students who have won the prestigious Marshall Scholarship. They join three others –– Tarun Chhabra, Bhooma Aravamuthan, and Ankur Bahl –– which was reported by News India-Times early December.

The British scholarship, which awarded 43 recipients this year, selected outstanding American students to continue their studies for two to three years at a British university of their choice. Each scholarship is worth about $60,000 and covers tuition, research, living and travel expenses. Individuals are selected on the basis of high levels of academic and personal achievements.

Bal plans to do an M.Phil in Development Studies from the University of Oxford. A senior health and societies major in the College of Arts and Sciences, she is from Bloomfield, N.J., and a University Scholar at Penn.

“Harveen Bal is a truly exceptional Marshall Scholar with a mission,” said John Jay Iselin, chairman of the New York region Marshall selection committee. “She combines a brilliant mind and an outstanding academic record with a nobility of purpose and a selfless commitment to improving the health of poor, underserved communities in the developing world. In time, we believe Harveen will be a remarkable physician and humanitarian leader of great potential.”

Ambika Bumb

Bumb, who is a senior in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology, will pursue Medical Engineering at Oxford. Last year, as an intern at GE Healthcare she helped her team diagnose and repair a problem that caused new blood pressure monitors at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia to take more than 10 minutes to get a reading –– time that could mean the difference between life and death in an emergency room.

“This may sound idealistic,” said Bumb, “but I want to help come up with a new technology or treatment for a disease. I want to be the person who follows it through to make sure it reaches the people I’m developing it for.”

Bumb said she knows medical treatments won’t help anyone if they can’t be commercially viable. “You have to tailor the research to the market,” she said. “For example, you develop drugs for Africa, not treatments that require lots of machines.”

While at Tech, Bumb worked with associate professor Gang Bao on developing nanomolecular beacon tracking devices to map the territory of cells. This year, she is extending this research by designing a new tracking tool, a quantum dot, for vitamin D in the lab of professor Barbara Boyan.

In addition, she helped found a new Indian dance team at Tech, Nazaaqat, which played to a packed house at the Ferst Center for the Arts.