Three Yale students have been awarded two of the world’s most competitive scholarships — the Rhodes and Mitchell scholarships.

Yale’s sole winner of the Rhodes Scholarship is Jarrad Aguirre ’09, Davenport College student majoring in Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology.

This year, 32 students from among 769 applicants were awarded the Rhodes scholarship, which funds two years of graduate study at Oxford University. Princeton University had three Rhodes winners, while Harvard University had two.

During his time at Yale, Colorado native Aguirre concentrated his studies on global health disparities, a topic he investigated while in Asia and Latin America, according to the Rhodes Trust. During his junior year, he was among 10 juniors inducted by Phi Beta Kappa. Beyond the realm of academics, Aguirre founded an organization to help Latino students inclined toward math and science enroll in graduate school.

While at Oxford, Aguirre plans to complete a Masters of Science in Medical Anthropology and a second MSc in Global Health Science, said Yale Associate Director for UK and Irish Fellowships Katherine Dailinger. After his time at Oxford, Aguirre will likely go on to pursue a medical school degree, she said.

Matt Baum ’09 of Berkeley College, also an MCDB major, is one of 12 students nationwide to earn the George J. Mitchell Fellowship, along with recent graduate Rebekah Emanuel ’07, an Ethics, Politics and Economics major from Ezra Stiles College.

Baum, who is in the process of earning simultaneous bachelor’s and master’s degrees, has worked at a number of labs around the world, according to the Mitchell Fellowship Web site. Research he worked on in a Belgian lab led to an important discovery in the field of Fragile X syndrome and the transformation of short-term memories into long-term memories.

At Yale, Baum is president of the Yale wrestling team and a member of the Yale rugby club. He plans to pursue a master’s in neuroscience at Trinity College Dublin.

After graduating from Yale, Emanuel worked with the Ugandan Parliament on issues of gender-based crimes. She lived in Israel for a year studying narratives of death and their impact on politics and civil society, the Web site said. Next year, as the recipient of a Simon Fellowship for Noble Purpose, she will travel to New Delhi to try to improve care for the terminally ill there.

Emanuel, who is also an artist, will pursue a master’s in human rights law through a cross-border program at Queen’s University Belfast and NUI Galway.

The Mitchell Scholarship, sponsored by the US-Ireland Alliance, funds one year of postgraduate study in any discipline offered by institutions of higher learning in Ireland and Northern Ireland.