The late Mrs. Dolores Zohrab Liebmann was the daughter of the great early twentieth-century Armenian intellectual, writer, and statesman Krikor Zohrab. During her lifetime, Mrs. Liebmann supported students and educational and charitable organizations, with a primary concern to attract and support students with outstanding character and ability, who would hold promise for achievement and distinction in their chosen fields of study.
Through a generous bequest at her death, Mrs. Liebmann created a perpetual charitable trust designated as “The Dolores Zohrab Liebmann Fund” for the purpose of funding advanced education and graduate study grants, which must be carried out entirely in the United States of America.
Beginning in 2022, the Trustees of the Liebmann Fund, at the suggestion of the Selection Committee, decided that the Eastern Diocese would be among the select institutions eligible to nominate one candidate per year for the Dolores Zohrab Liebmann Graduate Fellowship.
The Eastern Diocese is pleased to announce that Arthur Ipek, a Masters of Science student in Cognitive Neuroscience at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, has been awarded the Dolores Zohrab Liebmann Fund Fellowship for academic year 2023–2024. Fellowships cover the cost of tuition and provide a stipend for living expenses.
In 2020, Mr. Ipek earned two Bachelor of Arts degrees from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in Psychology and Linguistics. While still a high school student, he began interning at the Zohrab Information Center, where he worked for several years between 2015–2017. He has also taught music at Holy Martyrs Armenian Language School. On June 4 of this year, he was ordained to the diaconate at Saint Gregory the Enlightener Armenian Church (White Plains, NY), where he has played the organ and served at the altar since 2020.
With experience in both natural languages (e.g., Armenian, Turkish, French) and programming languages (e.g., Python, R, SPSS), Mr. Ipek is currently pursuing courses in behavioral neuroscience, the cognitive neuroscience of memory, and psycholinguistics during his Masters program. He is also conducting research at the intersection of language, perception, and cognition, conducting studies that measure brain waves upon humans presented with sentences to process.
Mr. Ipek said, “My decision to apply to the fellowship was primarily driven by the legacy of Dolores Zohrab Liebmann and her earnest commitment to research, both to the American community at large, as well as the Armenian community. Apart from the scientific research that I intend to pursue with this generous scholarship, her establishment of the Zohrab Information Center in the heart of the Armenian community, at which I have interned for four years, has been a center of research for scholars of Armenian Studies, looking to enrich their research through its invaluable collections. There I gained experience in the rigor of conducting scholarly research, and I am grateful to be able to continue my graduate research thanks to this generous fellowship.”
The Dolores Zohrab Liebmann Fellowships are awarded only to candidates who have outstanding undergraduate records, have demonstrated a need for financial assistance, are citizens of the United States of America, are enrolled in accredited colleges and universities in the United States, and have received baccalaureate degrees. The trustees welcome applications from students of all national origins who are United States citizens.
Applications for the next cycle of funding will be announced in the Fall.
