Nicole Perry, a graduate student in Pharmacology at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, is one of 100 doctoral students in the United States and Canada selected to receive a $15,000 P.E.O. Scholar Award this year from the P.E.O. Sisterhood, a philanthropic educational organization based in Des Moines, Iowa.
She was sponsored by P.E.O. International Chapter AU in Maryville, Tennessee.
Perry graduated summa cum laude in both her majors of Chemistry and Biology from Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio, in 2014. She was honored as a Mortar Board Fellow and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa as a junior.
She spent a summer doing research at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville as part of the Research Experience for Undergraduates program funded by the National Science Foundation before joining the labs of Vsevolod Gurevich, Ph.D., and Tina Iverson, Ph.D., at Vanderbilt in 2015.
The P.E.O. Scholar Awards were established in 1991 to provide support for study and research for women in the United States and Canada who are pursuing a doctoral-level degree at an accredited college or university.
Scholar Award recipients are a select group of women chosen for their high level of academic achievement and their potential for having a positive impact on society.
The P.E.O. Sisterhood was founded in 1869 at Iowa Wesleyan College in Mount Pleasant, Iowa.
Today the organization has grown to nearly a quarter of a million members in approximately 6,000 local chapters throughout the United States and Canada.