Two University of California, Berkeley, students and one UC Berkeley alumna are among 40 new recipients from the United States of Gates Cambridge Scholarships. In October, the trio will join fellow Gates Scholars from all over the world in pursuing graduate degrees at Cambridge University in England.

Johanna Hanink, Calvert Jones and Amparo Flores were awarded the 2006 scholarships based on their exceptional academic achievement, leadership capacity and desire to use their knowledge to improve the lives of others, according to Ed Strauss, director of communications for Cambridge in America, which is based in New York. "UC Berkeley can be proud of what these three scholars have accomplished because the competition for Gates Scholarships has become quite formidable," Strauss said.

Now in its sixth year, the Gates Cambridge Scholarship program has brought more than 500 students from 72 countries to Cambridge for graduate studies in a wide range of subjects: the arts, science, humanities, social science, technology and medicine. Scholarships cover the full cost of study at the university, including living expenses, transportation and a discretionary fee for study-related activities. The program is administered by the Gates Cambridge Trust which was established in 2000 with a $210 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation of Seattle to enable outstanding graduate students from outside the United Kingdom to study at Cambridge.

A year at Cambridge will provide Johanna Hanink, a Ph.D. student in the UC Berkeley Classics Department, the opportunity to focus her work."I won't be taking as many classes, so I can spend most of my time doing research and writing," she said, referring to the Cambridge system that holds class time to a minimum while emphasizing self-directed research and one-on-one tutorials. Hanink will use her time at Cambridge to research how classical Greek tragedy from the 5th century B.C. influenced Hellenistic poetry two centuries later. A native of Ashford, Conn., she plans to return to UC Berkeley for her Ph.D. after receiving a master of philosophy degree at Cambridge.