The Flinn Scholars Program

Sixteen graduating Flinn Scholars, who are preparing to start new life adventures later this year, were honored during the Flinn Scholars Program’s annual Recognition Dinner May 4 at the Ritz-Carlton in Phoenix.

The Flinn Scholars Program and its Class of 2013 honored the Arizona educators who played a special role in the education and development of the high-school seniors.

Already, a record-setting 650+ applications for the 2013 Flinn Scholarship have been winnowed to the final 72. Now comes the really exciting part: on January 4 and 5, the semifinalists for one of the most prestigious merit-based scholarships in the nation will gather at the Flinn Foundation for interviews.

Matt Ellsworth, a former Flinn Scholar and a five-year Flinn Foundation staff member, has been named the fourth director in the program’s 26-year history. Ellsworth graduated from Prescott High School in 1993, attended Arizona State University as a Flinn Scholar, and earned a master's degree at George Mason University.

Over the last two years, a stunning total of 14 undergraduates at Arizona State University and the University of Arizona won the Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship, the most prestigious undergraduate award in the nation for students in mathematics, the natural sciences, and engineering who intend to pursue research careers. One reason for the Goldwater glut at Arizona's universities: a deck stacked with Flinn Scholars. 

Ten years ago, when Andrew Shemin ('98) traveled to France for a semester as a Flinn Scholar, one of his independent-study projects involved spending many days in the city parks of Paris, where, notebook in hand, he recorded his observations about how public space contributes to Parisian life. Today, Shemin's new project, a documentary film, provides evidence that his semester in Paris was time well spent.

BusinessWeek, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News... As global economic turmoil has continued in the second half of 2011, one news outlet after another has turned to Flinn Scholar alumna Sara Zervos ('87).

Halfway through her studies at one of the nation's premier medical schools, Mayo Clinic College of Medicine in Rochester, Minn., Nicole Person-Rennell has passed her Step 1 board exams and is nearing the end of a summertime surgery rotation at Mayo Clinic's Scottsdale campus. But her time in her home state is short; in September, the 2005 Flinn Scholar will step away from medical school for a year to complete a master's degree in public health at Cambridge University in England. Funding her studies is one of the world's most prestigious post-graduate prizes, the Gates Cambridge Scholarship.