Kriste Lipold Wins Boren Award

Senior religion major Kriste Lipold recently won a prestigious Boren Scholarship Award that will allow her to study in Slovenia later this year.  She will graduate with her bachelor's degree this spring and subsequently learn Slovene in Slovenia before returning to the U.S. to fulfill the federal service requirement for the program.  Boren Awards fund the intensive study of language and culture abroad by U.S. undergraduate students in world religions critical to U.S. interests.

Lipold says, "The academic study of religion has prepared me to unearth deeper cultural competency by engaging with the linguistic, cultural, and ethnic factors that intertwine to create a society. Through this lens, I identify how communities are affected by their religious roots and how national security is impacted."

In addition to studying Global Religions with an interdisciplinary focus, Lipold also studies Intelligence Analysis in the College of Integrated Science and Engineering at JMU.  In her future work, she plans to advance national security analysis using knowledge of Slovenian environmentalism and conservation.