2025 Scholarship Nominees

Cadigan Perriello of St. Anne’s Belfield

Cadigan is a deep thinker and the top student in her class.   One teacher calls her one of the brightest young women to ever attend St. Anne’s.  She also loves science and spent last summer working alongside PhD students at Uva trying to find vaccine candidates for a gastro-intestinal disease afflicting infants and children in Bangladesh.  In December she spent time in Bangladesh meeting doctors as well as patients affected by the disease.   When Cadigan became editor-in-chief of At. Anne’s faltering school newspaper she took the paper from publishing just 2 editions a year to publishing a robust 10 editions.  She was captain of the cross-country team last fall and played Beth in the school production of Little Women.  Cadigan has been accepted at Princeton and plans to pursue a dual PhD and MD and promote more rapid advances in vaccine development.   

Gwyneth Caroline Cox of Community Lab School

Gwen is brilliant and humble. She’s the top student in her class and will be the first in her family to attend college.  As captain of the squash team, she’s been teaching younger players and was startled one day to hear a kid say, “You’re not my mentor anymore because I beat you.” It made her think about the balance between selflessness and leadership.  Now she’s making space to work on her own skills and growth while still coaching.  Gwen’s passion about keeping the earth clean and recycling and composting led her to create the school’s Environmental Science club. Gwen is most at home when she’s running and loves the feeling of calm when she’s alone and running. Her mother is her role model. Gwen watched her navigate misogyny during their time in a religious cult before they escaped.  She saw her mother grow and become an advocate for other women.  Gwen has been accepted into Yale among other schools.  She says, “I watched so many Gilmore girl episodes with my mom I really wanted to go to Yale!”

Madeleine Ford Clodfelter of Renaissance School

Madeleine has been one of her school’s highest achieving students over the past several years and has connected with researchers and field experts at the University of Virginia. She is president of her school’s Model General Assembly and serves as co-president of the History Club and the Yearbook Club. She believes a leader, “Acts with joy, love, and true passion for what they are pursuing, for the people they are working with, and for the progress they make as a whole.” Since moving to Charlottesville from Raleigh, Madeleine says, “The life I’ve built for myself is filled with friends, acquaintances, and people I adore--relationships I have made myself.” Asked to pick three attributes that best describe her, Madeleine chose “Ardent, Erudite and Fearless.”

Margaret Lee of Western Albemarle High School

Inspired by a great grandmother’s battle with dementia, Margaret Lee organized students to participate in weekly music shifts at Martha Jefferson Hospital and perform monthly concerts at a local nursing home. She and another student have established eight different chapters in Virginia, California, New York and North Carolina. She also plays second violin in the all-adult Waynesboro Symphony Orchestra. Margaret aspires to become an oncologist and work to help dismantle discrimination within the healthcare system. She runs Western’s Young Asian and Pacific Islander Club.  As an active member of Western’s student equity group, she was instrumental in helping the faculty see that they needed to be teaching a fuller curriculum, one where people of color are also featured, and their histories and contributions are celebrated. Margaret is also part of a team working to create a protocol to address racism, hate, and discrimination at the county-wide level and she serves as student representative to the Albemarle County School Board.

Mia Martin of Miller School

As editor-in-chief of the school literary magazine Mia noticed that while there are many students from other nations at Miller, nearly all the submissions are in English.  So, she persuaded bilingual students to submit their works in their first language and then found skilled student translators.  As a result, the magazine for the first time had numerous bilingual pieces, including a poignant poem by a junior from China who said seeing her writing in both languages was the first time she felt her work really mattered. Mia is president of the Gender-Sexuality Alliance at Miller School and hosted a forum for queer students to express their fears over the future of LGBTQ+ rights and mental health and concerns about teen suicides.  After college she wants to work in the publishing industry—specifically in diverse publishing to uplift marginalized voices in what she says is often an exclusive and inaccessible field.

Vidya Ambati of Albemarle High School

Vidya loves science and excels in it and believes access to science is a universal human right.  Working with science mentors at UVA she discovered a new approach to treating arthritis.  She made the surprising discovery that an anti-psychotic drug called Haldol dramatically reduces the risk of developing rheumatoid arthritis and gout.  Vidya is alarmed that many young women around the world are not exposed to what she calls “the liberating joys of science.”  So, she created an international webinar series that connects students to renowned scientists.  She calls it “STASH” which stands for Speak To A Scientist Hero.  She has expanded it to more than 1,000 students in 190 schools in eight countries.