Announcing 2025 Winners of the Newman Exploration Travel Awards
WashU Libraries are thrilled to announce the winners of this year’s Newman Exploration Travel Fund Award.
The NEXT Award program is intended to support Washington University students, faculty, and staff who wish to explore this vast world. Travel is a valued means to expand one’s horizons and inspire growth, excellence, and innovation while pursuing both personal and professional goals.
Eight applicants won the 2025 NEXT awards. Awardees include undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, and staff members.
Undergraduate Student Winners
Maggie Coleman is majoring in architecture at the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts. She will travel to Copenhagen, Denmark, Stockholm, Sweden, and Helsinki, Finland, to study the cities that have best integrated architecture and GIS (Geographic Information Systems) to shape their built environments.
Sidarth Gazula, an economics, computer science, and education studies major in the College of Arts & Sciences, will travel to India to explore the critical role of India’s education system and cultural environment in shaping young chess prodigies, who have dominated global chess competitions in recent years.
Anja Rauscher is a biomedical engineering major at the McKelvey School of Engineering. She will visit Western and Central Europe, including Switzerland, France, Germany, Italy, and England, to interact with both high-tech medicine and long-standing healing traditions in rural communities.
Graduate Student Winners
Nick Dolan, a PhD student of English, will travel to El Salvador and Boulder, Colorado, to research and learn from the legacy of liberation theology of Jesuits in Latin America.
Yihao Li, an MA-PhD student of art history, will travel to Switzerland to engage with historical artifacts and archival materials to understand the cultural history of automata or mechanical artworks in early modern Europe and artistic exchanges between Europe and China.
Faculty and Staff Winners
Husain Lateef, associate professor of social work in the Brown School, will journey to several cities in Morocco to explore the historical, cultural, and religious influences that worked as a bridge to connect a community of African American Muslims in Phoenix, Arizona, to a global Islamic community.
Shreyas Ravi Krishnan, assistant professor at the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts, will visit the United Kingdom to research diasporic South Asian feminist and queer periodicals, pamphlets, and posters from the 1980s and 1990s.
Jayde Homer, a statistical data analyst in Arts & Sciences, will visit several U.S. National Parks in Washington, Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, and Minnesota to observe and log birds, expand her conservation knowledge, and learn about national parks’ citizen science education efforts.