Menlo Park, CA (May 11, 2009) - The HAND Foundation announced the names of the 2009 recipients of its scholarship programs.  Maryam Farboodi received the Bita Daryabari Scholarship for Women in Economics and Rasool Zandvakil was awarded the HAND Research Foundation Scholarship. Both scholarships will be applied to doctoral studies in economics at the University of Chicago, where the recipients will enroll in the fall of 2009.

Maryam earned a Master of Science degree from the University of Texas at Austin where she is currently enrolled in the doctoral program in Economics. She was given an award for her second year paper in Optimal Auctioneer Strategies in Position Auctions. Maryam plans to focus on corporate finance and mechanism design during her doctoral studies. Maryam said: "I am honored to receive the Bita Daryabari scholarship and admire her advancement of women through education and empowerment programs whether they be in Afghanistan, Palestine or United States.  I hope to pass on the goodwill to the next generation of women that I might be able to mentor through my work."

Rasool, who ranked 17 on the Iranian National University Entrance Exam (concours) out of 400,000 participants, earned a Master of Arts degree in Economics and Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from University of British Columbia where he is currently enrolled in the doctoral program in Economics. He plans to focus his doctoral studies on monetary economics and international finance. "We are pleasantly surprised to see the rise in the number of applicants who have admissions from world's top 10 economics schools. Rasool exemplifies the generation of students who started in engineering but transitioned seamlessly into economics seeking to solve not only technical problems but also social ones."

Both Maryam and Rasool are also graduates of Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran.  Previous scholarships have been awarded to for doctoral studies in economics to: Amir Reza Mohsenzadeh Kermani at MIT; Seyed Ali Madanizadeh at University of Chicago and Kowsar Yousefi at the University of Texas, Austin.

The HAND Foundation is a private foundation with a mission of the advancement of the sector of philanthropy, development of a global middle class and the prevention of child sexual abuse. The foundation primarily funds education and research programs to achieve these goals. The foundation awards up to two scholarships a year to students from Iran for their first year of a doctoral program in the top economics doctoral programs in the United States and the United Kingdom. The foundation aims to create a network of young Iranian economists through the scholarships and the support of conferences and a website dedicated to advancing research on Iran's economy: http://handresearch.org/pages/index.php.

... Payvand News - 05/13/09 ... --

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