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Two UWA graduates have been awarded 2013 Fulbright Scholarships to study in the United States, joining an elite worldwide group that claims dozens of Nobel Laureates and Pulitzer Prize winners in its ranks.

The areas in which Roxanne Moore and Tiago Tomaz are making their careers – human right advocacy and feeding a hungry world – reflect the scholarship’s high ideals. They join last year’s winner, Sam Brophy-Williams who is nearing the end of his Master of Public Health studies at Harvard University (see Grad Briefs).

Roxanne came to UWA from Margaret River, and remembers the value of the Flying Start Orientation Program and the Blackstone Society for providing ‘instant friends’. She also found an inspiring mentor when doing a parliamentary internship with former MLC Giz Watson that led to full time work in the parliamentarian’s electorate office. “This was the first real human rights work I’d done;” she recalls.

The graduate credits many in the Law School for their help including Professor Simon Young, Associate Professor Alex Gardner and Professor Natalia Skead. “I certainly didn’t breeze through Law by any means. I had to work hard and these lecturers in particular were always willing to spend time outside of class to assist me. I felt I was a student rather than a student number to most professors and tutors in the school,” she remembers.

Mooting helped hone her debating skills and she won the Blake Dawson Waldron Student Paper Competition in 2010 and was in the 2009 international Jessup Mooting contest that sparked her enthusiasm for international and human rights law. “I’ll never forget representing UWA internationally in Washington DC and will always be indebted to my coaches Ben Gauntlett and Jeremy Sher as well as graduates David Leigh and Breony Allen.”

When she applied for a Fulbright, Roxanne contacted professors, graduates and Human Rights Watch to ask advice about the best place to study international and human rights law in the United States. “Overwhelmingly, the response was New York University,” says Roxanne who is hoping that an international internship will come out of her NYU studies. Long term, she wants to return to Australia to become a human rights advocate.

“Australia is one of the only liberal democracies without national human rights protection, and it’s time that changed,” she says. “I hope to significantly contribute to building these legal structures for human rights protection, and I’d like to see a nation that values human rights, respects our international obligations and works to protect the vulnerable, not just in legal terms but more broadly as a cultural change. Call me a dreamer, but I think we can get there.”

While Roxanne began to consider international law while mooting in Washington, Tiago Tomaz says he had plenty of time to consider the extraordinary properties of oxygen “sitting on my surf board breathing in the clean ocean air and thinking about the crucial role that plants play in supplying it”.

For his PhD completed last year, the graduate studied the way plant metabolism can be manipulated to produce beneficial traits in plants. At the UWA-based Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Plant Energy Biology, Tiago investigated the way plants “breathe” and produce energy. His key finding was that removing two proteins involved in respiration can increase levels of Vitamin C and have a big effect on plant growth. He pays tribute to his supervisor, Winthrop Professor Harvey Millar, who recently became the first Australian to win a prestigious American award (see In Focus).

Tiago, whose long term plan is to build a career in Australian agriculture, is now looking forward to working at the University of Illinois, a world leader is research on major crop adaptions to future climates. The next two years will be spent on field research in WA and the US, exploring wheat, barley and corn cultivation in waterlimited and frost-prone areas.

“My time as a student at UWA gave me a clear route to pursuing my passion for the environment,” says the graduate. “I’m now looking to building upon the knowledge and techniques learnt at UWA by applying these outside the laboratory in field-based research on crop plants.”

Since graduating Tiago has worked as a research officer with the Department of Agriculture WA. “The tight knit-relations between the department and this State’s agricultural sector have given me the opportunity to meet growers, breeders and other important players,” says the graduate, “and being a people person, I enjoy the human element of my work.”