This year, three seniors from Yale were named to the Rhodes Scholars class of 2014 after winning the prestigious award.

Isabel Beshar ’14, Suzanna Fritzberg ’14, and Vinay Nayak ’14 were selected as part of a contingent of 32 students from across America who will attend the University of Oxford for two or three years of fully-funded postgraduate study.

Last year Yale won a University-record nine Rhode Scholarships with seven representatives chosen from America and two international recipients from South Africa and Germany respectively. This year, Harvard exceeded all colleges with six scholars followed by Yale and Stanford with three apiece. Princeton, the University of Virginia, and West Point won two scholarships each and twelve other schools were represented in this year’s class.

Beshar, a double-major in molecular, cellular, & developmental biology and history of science and medicine, is a global health fellow at Yale and plans to study medical anthropology at Oxford. She also worked with the New Haven-León Sister City Project to plan a service trip to Nicaragua and has done extensive research and fieldwork in the area of diabetes — the subject of two senior essays she is currently writing at the University. Beshar was also president of Yale’s Public Health Coalition.

Fritzberg, who currently majors in women’s gender & sexuality studies, has worked as a poverty policy intern at the Roosevelt Institute and as an intern for the public defender’s office in New Orleans. She is also the public relations coordinate for the Yale Women’s Center, a writing tutor at the Yale College Writing Center, and in grassroots politics as the fellowship program director for the student-run political action committee, Students for a New American Politics. At Oxford, Fritzberg will study comparative social policy.

Nayak is a senior majoring in political science with the intention of studying public policy and the social science of the internet at the University of Oxford. He was a digital constituency manager in the Chicago headquarters of President Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign and was a White House intern this past summer. He also works on social media outreach for Sandy Hook Promise, an organization that advocates stricter gun control and gun responsibility and was started by the parents of children who lost their lives in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. At Yale, Nayak is a captain of the Yale Mock Trial team and a member of the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity. He also ran and lost a campaign for Ward 1 Alderman against current-Alderman Sarah Eidelson ’12 in 2011.