PROVIDENCE, R.I. – Commissioner Mike Aresco has announced that Tulsa’s Kirk Smith and Cincinnati’s Juliana Madzia, a pair of cross country/track and field standouts, have been unanimously chosen as the winners of the Commissioner’s Postgraduate Leadership Awards by the American Athletic Conference Academic Affairs Committee.
 
The awards are given to one male and one female student-athlete from an American Athletic Conference-sponsored sport who have been admitted to a degree-granting or professional program for the following year and who have demonstrated leadership through excellence in academic credentials, athletic performance and depth of commitment to service within the institution or the community.
 
Smith and Madzia will each receive a $5,000 scholarship, which may be applied to postgraduate study.


 
Smith, who hails from St. Louis, Missouri, is a Rhodes Scholar who holds a 4.00 grade-point average in mechanical engineering. He has been a member of four conference-championship teams in cross country - three in the American Athletic Conference and one in Conference USA - and was a part of two indoor track and field teams that registered runner-up finishes at The American Championships.
 
Smith serves as an undergraduate researcher with Tulsa’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, Energy and Nanoscale Transport Lab and has been a research assistant with Technische Hochschule Ingolstadt in Germany and with the Colorado School of Mines Department of Physics. He will pursue a Ph.D. in engineering science at Oxford University.


 
Madzia, a native of St. Clairsville, Ohio, holds a 4.00 grade-point average in neuroscience, with a minor in women’s, gender and sexuality studies, at Cincinnati. She was an all-conference performer at the 2016 American Athletic Conference Cross Country Championships, where she took 13th place, and is ranked 10th on the Bearcats’ all-time list in the outdoor 10,000-meter run.
 
Madzia was a Rhodes Scholarship finalist and a University of Cincinnati Presidential Leadership Medal of Excellence Finalist in 2017. She is a National Merit finalist and scholarship recipient and has been inducted to the Phi Beta Kappa and Omicron Delta Kappa honors societies. She is a student researcher at Cincinnati and is the founder of Cincinnati Students Indivisible and co-president of UC GlobeMed. She plans to pursue a postgraduate track in medicine and has been accepted to a number of graduate programs.