Harvard Magazine names Ledecky Fellows

Harvard Magazine’s Berta Greenwald Ledecky Undergraduate Fellows for the 2007-08 academic year will be Liz Goodwin ’08 and Samuel Bjork ’09, who were selected from a competitive evaluation of 30 student writers’ applications for the position — the largest pool of candidates in the program’s history. The fellows, who join the editorial staff during the year, contribute to the magazine’s “The Undergraduate” column and by initiating story ideas, writing news and feature items, and editing copy before publication.

Goodwin, of Galveston, Texas, resides in Eliot House and concentrates in history and literature, with a focus on Latin America and North America. An executive editor at the Crimson, she expects to work this summer setting up a newspaper in a home for street children in La Paz, Bolivia. In previous summers, Goodwin has taught English in Panama and studied literature in Argentina.

Bjork, of Minneapolis and also of Eliot House, is concentrating in chemical and physical biology. He has done a tour as a “Let’s Go” researcher/writer in Germany and has written for the Harvard Book Review and the Crimson. Bjork is also involved in the undergraduate Writing Center, the fiction board of the Advocate, and as a violinist with the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra. He expects to spend the summer working in the laboratory of George Church, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School.

The fellowship is supported by Jonathan J. Ledecky ’79, M.B.A. ’83 and named in honor of his mother.