UIC LAS Senior Sonya Gupta Earns Trip to Rhodes Scholar Finals

Sonya Gupta, an Honors College member majoring in biological sciences and Russian in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences reached the finalist stage for the Rhodes Scholarship, the highly regarded and selective award that covers all expenses for two or three years of study at the University of Oxford in England.

She was among 16 candidates from Illinois and Ohio vying for the prominent international academic scholarship during the District 10 finalist interviews, which took place Nov. 19-20 via Zoom.

She envisions working as a physician, both academic and clinical, with a focus on encouraging international and local collaboration in medicine and health equity promotion. Gupta’s academic career at UIC has featured various research projects, including a radiological sciences project at Stanford University’s School of Medicine, multiple projects in neuroimaging and breast cancer therapies at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, and an independent research fellowship exploring state medicine’s politicization in Russia with support from the U.S. Russia Foundation, an American nonprofit.