When Maureen Quigley receives her master's degree in public administration from Cornell University this May, she'll be updating her passport as well as her résumé.

Quigley, a student of international development policy in Cornell's Institute for Public Affairs (CIPA), has received a Luce Scholarship, which will fund a one-year internship in Asia to be arranged specifically for her. She is one of 18 Luce Scholars chosen this year from approximately 60 U.S. colleges and universities, and the 10th from Cornell since the scholarships were first awarded in 1974.

"Maureen Quigley's selection for this prestigious national award speaks highly of her own abilities and of the quality of Cornell's programs in international development and public affairs," said Cornell President Hunter Rawlings. "I am very pleased that she will be able to cap a successful academic career at Cornell and expand her expertise in international development policy with the year-long internship in Asia that the Luce Scholarship provides." The Luce Scholars Program is sponsored by the Luce Foundation, named after Henry R. Luce, the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Time Inc., who was born in China's Shandong province. According to a foundation brochure, the program "is unique among American- Asian exchanges in that it is intended for young leaders who have had no prior experience of Asia and who might not otherwise have an opportunity in the normal course of their careers to come to know Asia or their Asian counterparts and contemporaries." Quigley, Cornell's second Luce scholar in the past three years, learned of her award on Feb. 26 following a lengthy and rigorous application process that included two sets of interviews with the scholarship's sponsors. She knows she will be leaving in August to work in a rural community in Asia, but does not yet know where that community will be.

Quigley received a bachelor's degree in business finance and French from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1989. While attending Cornell she worked in Capetown, South Africa, as a development consultant with the Triple Trust Organization, which helps residents gain skills to start their own businesses. She also has worked as a field consultant with indigenous women's craft cooperatives in Mexico and, in Massachusetts, with the Western Sahara Awareness Project, Ryka Rose Foundation and Cultural Survival.