David L. Boren Awards for International Study

Russ Burns grew up in Banner Elk, a small town in North Carolina, and he went to college about 75 miles away. But since earning his bachelor's degree from Davidson College, Mr. Burns has traveled to Jordan to study Arabic, and now, with the help of a Boren Fellowship, he is bound for Syria this August to study economic reform and foreign policy in that country.

Mr. Burns, a master's student in the Elliott School's Middle East studies program, has worked as a paralegal at a corporate law firm, and works part time as a research assistant at the U.S. Institute of Peace while studying full time at the Elliott School. He says he chose the Elliott School for his studies because it offered "substantive depth" in his two greatest areas of interest: modern politics and Middle East history, and international relations theory.

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