Rhodes Scholar–Isra Bhatty

CHICAGO, IL– Isra Bhatty, a University of Chicago graduate and now a law student at Yale University, has been selected as the Rhodes Scholar for 2008. She was one of 32 students from across the US who were selected from a list of 764 applicants. The scholarships provide two or three years of study at the prestigious Oxford University in England beginning next year.

Bhatty of Glenview, Illinois, is a 2006 graduate of University of Chicago, with concentrations in Economics and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. She is a first-year student at Yale Law School. She was elected to Phi Beta Kappa as a third-year student and won many prizes for leadership and scholarship at the University of Chicago.

She founded a tutoring program in Chicago, was an English-Urdu translator of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, led a Chicago coalition on criminal justice reform and chaired Chicago’s inner-city Muslim Action Network. She founded and captained the intramural champion women’s football team and is a hip-hop artist and poet. At Oxford she plans to study evidence-based social intervention.

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