Three Princeton seniors, Sherif Girgis, Brett Masters and Landis Stankievech, have been awarded Rhodes Scholarships for two or three years of graduate study at the University of Oxford.

Rhodes Scholarship winners are chosen on the basis of high academic achievement, integrity of character, a spirit of unselfishness, respect for others, potential for leadership, and physical vigor. Girgis and Masters are among the 32 American college students who won the fellowships, while Stankievech is a winner from Canada.  All three are recipients of endowed scholarships at Princeton.

Sherif Girgis '08, a Dover, Del., resident who was born in Cairo, Egypt, is a philosophy major at Princeton and intends to study philosophy at Oxford.  

Girgis has been an active voice on campus addressing political and social issues as the president of the Elizabeth Anscombe Society, a student organization that promotes traditionally conservative conceptions of marriage, family and sexuality, and as editor-in-chief of the Princeton Tory, a conservative magazine. He also has contributed to The Daily Princetonian.

A student of Spanish, German, Italian and French, Girgis has served as a Spanish translator at the University Medical Center at Princeton and as an English tutor. He also is a senior co-leader of the Aquinas Institute Catholic Chaplaincy at Princeton and a junior fellow at the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.

Girgis was the winner of the 2007 Dante Prize for the best undergraduate essay in the nation on the Italian poet. At Princeton, he has won the German Department Book Prize and the Dorothea Vandyke McLane Prize for the highest performing freshman in Italian.

Sherif Girgis is a recipient of the Frank Hoyt Little and Tacey May Little Scholarship.

Brett Masters '08, a Charlotte, Mich., native, is a comparative literature major who hopes to further his academic interest in the medieval period at Oxford.

He has received the Quin Morton Freshman Writing Prize and an Edwin Ferris grant from the Council of the Humanities to fund unpaid internships in academics or the media, which he used while working at publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

In his study of medieval literature, Masters is particularly interested in the ways medieval authors thought about sexuality and personal identity. Next spring he hopes to travel to Florence to extend his research for a senior thesis on the 13th-century Italian poem "Il Fiore," allegedly written by Dante. He hopes to further expand the scope of this work in the medieval English studies program at Oxford.

At Princeton, Masters is a peer educator at the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Center and helped organize efforts last year by the Gay Family Rights Project to legalize gay marriage. He has tutored grade school and middle school students with the Step-Up After-School Program and the Princeton Young Achievers.

Brett Masters is a recipient of The Princeton Club of Michigan Charles W. Williams '38 Memorial Scholarship.

Landis Stankievech '08, who is from Trochu, Alberta, is a mechanical and aerospace engineering major who plans to earn a second bachelor's degree at Oxford in a joint program in philosophy, politics and economics, after which he hopes to work on environmental issues.

Among other honors, Stankievech was awarded the Shapiro Prize for Academic Excellence in 2005 and 2006 and the Manfred Pyka Memorial Physics Prize in 2005.

Stankievech also has excelled as a member of the Princeton men's ice hockey team. As an athlete, Stankievech has been involved in several youth programs, including teaching youngsters to skate in the Special Olympics Skating Program and coaching in the Princeton Youth Hockey program.

Landis Stankievech is a recipient of the Class of 1972 Memorial Scholarship.