"I am deeply honored and moved to join the Rhodes community," says Abreu Jerez, who grew up in the Bronx and whose family comes from the Dominican Republic.
As a first-generation, low-income student and campus organizer, receiving the Rhodes "gave me hope that students like me can be recognized," says Abreu Jerez, who double majored in quantitative social science and geography modified with African and African American studies.
Abreu Jerez—who plans a career as a social epidemiologist in high-impact policy organizations—will use the Rhodes to pursue master's degrees in global health science and epidemiology and in health service improvement and evaluation at Oxford. At Dartmouth, her research explored the socioeconomic inequities women, mothers, and health care workers face in the health care system. Her senior honors thesis, which examined labor organizing among home health aides in New York City, received high honors and earned her the Thelma Glass Award from the geography department. She graduated magna cum laude and was a class marshal.
Spurred into action by the accessibility issues she observed when working with the FUERZA Farmworkers' Fund, a student-led organization providing essential goods to migrant farm workers, Abreu Jerez founded the Women's Health Committee, which raised funds for medical expenses and created pathways for health care access for migrant farmworkers. She also was an organizer and steward with the Student Worker Collective at Dartmouth, student coordinator for the Office of Pluralism and Leadership's Latinx and Caribbean Advising Center, an organizer for the OPAL co-sponsored Central American Futurities 2.0 Conference, and a researcher for the history department's Mississippi Freedom Writers research group.
"I am deeply grateful to all my professors, specifically those in the geography and AAAS departments, who believed in me from the beginning and encouraged me to flourish and prosper," says Abreu Jerez, who says she is "still shocked" to have been named a Rhodes Scholar."I thank my community—friends, workers, student organizers—for being my central moral compass and guiding North Star," she says. "This honor would not have been possible without the multiple mutual aid organizations—FUERZA, SWCD, Co-FIRED—who uplifted and cared for me throughout my four years at Dartmouth. Remaining loyal to Rhodes' commitment to leadership, I intend to model the caring, solidarity-focused leadership I firmly believe can build a more equitable world for communities like mine who have been invisiblized for so long. I hope to champion these silenced voices at Oxford and the wider community with the same conviction as I did at Dartmouth."
Article Snippet Taken from Dartmouth News. Please read the full article on Rhodes Scholars named here.