The Center for Languages, Literatures and Cultures is pleased to announce one recipient of the NSEP Boren Undergraduate Scholarship and one Boren Graduate Fellowship for 2016-2017. Boren Scholarships provide up to $20,000 to U.S. undergraduate students and up to $24,000 to U.S. graduate students, to study abroad in areas of the world that are critical to U.S. interests and underrepresented in study abroad, including Africa, Asia, Central and Eastern Europe, Eurasia, Latin American and the Middle East. Boren Scholars study less commonly taught languages, including but not limited to Arabic, Chinese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Swahili.

Alexander Erdmann, a second year PhD student studying linguistics, received a Boren Fellowship to the NYU Abu Dhabi’s campus in the United Arab Emirates to work with NYUAD's CAMeL Lab (Computational Approaches to Modeling Language) on Arabic Natural Language Processing.  

“Basically, I'll be looking at some of the unique challenges the language presents to computers and working toward solutions that will attempt to narrow the gap between how well computers handle English data and how well they handle Arabic data.”

Robert Dahlhausen, world economy and business major with minors in Korean and Japanese, will study economics and Japanese at Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan with the Boren Scholarship.  Dalhausen is a U.S. Marine Corps veteran and served for five years as Arabic linguist.  He was trained in Modern Standard Arabic, Iraqi dialect, Levantine dialect and Egyptian dialect at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California.

“As current president of the East Asian Culture Club and public relations for the Korean Student Association here at Ohio State, I'm looking forward to getting involved with the student organizations at Waseda,” he said. “Particularly the language clubs.”

Boren Scholarships and Fellowships are funded by the National Security Education Program (NSEP), which focuses on geographic areas, languages, and fields of study deemed critical to U.S. national security. NSEP draws on a broad definition of national security, recognizing that the scope of national security has expanded to include not only the traditional concerns of protecting and promoting American well-being, but also the challenges of global society, including sustainable development, environmental degradation, global disease and hunger, population growth and migration, and economic competitiveness.

For more information about Ohio State’s Boren Application, please contact Rebecca Bias at bias.3@osu.edu, or 614-292-4137.  Many thanks to Dr. Jan Macian for her coordination and advising for the OSU NSEP Boren Program for 2015-2016.