A senior at the University of Pennsylvania and a Penn alumna have won 2016 Gates Cambridge Scholarships to pursue graduate degrees at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom.

Lucia Calthorpe and Morgan Seag are among 35 United States citizens selected and are the 29th and 30th Penn recipients since the scholarships were established in 2001.

Wallace Genser, senior associate director for fellowships and operations at Penn’s Center for Undergraduate Research and Fellowships, said that Calthorpe and Seag epitomize the scholarship’s focus on academic achievement, leadership and commitment to improving the lives of others.

“We at CURF are extremely pleased that the Gates committee recognized Lucia for her work on child nutrition as a crucial health intervention, and Morgan for her work on gendered institutional change in frontier research settings,” said Genser.

Calthorpe, a senior from Berkeley, Calif., is a Fox Fellow and Civic Scholar at Penn. She has volunteered at West Philadelphia High School and the HMS School for Children with Cerebral Palsy and currently volunteers at the Agatston Urban Nutrition Initiative fruit stand. In high school, she helped found Vincent Academy, a charter elementary school in Oakland, Calif. Calthorpe, will pursue a master’s degree in epidemiology at Cambridge to investigate the potential for schools to function as a locus for health intervention, with a specific focus on mechanisms for preventing childhood obesity. She will graduate in May from the College of Arts & Sciences with a bachelor’s degree in health and societies.

Seag, who graduated from Penn in 2008 with a bachelor’s degree in political science, spent two seasons in Antarctica as a contractor for the U.S. Antarctic Program. She completed her master’s degree in polar studies at Cambridge in 2015. Her dissertation explored diversity in frontier spaces through the lens of gender in Antarctica. She will build on this research as a doctoral candidate in polar studies at Cambridge, investigating institutional change in remote field spaces with a focus on Antarctica.