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An 22-year-old Albuquerque man has been selected as a recipient of the 2008 Rhodes scholarship.

Pravin Rajan, who graduated from a high school in Irvine, Calif., is a 2007 graduate of Georgetown University with degrees in science technology and international relations.

His parents, Sandhya and Mahesh Rajan, live in Albuquerque and work at Sandia National Laboratories. Rajan's younger sister attends the University of New Mexico, and his brother attends Albuquerque Academy.

The scholars were selected from 764 applicants endorsed by 294 colleges and universities. The scholarships, the oldest of the international study awards available to American students, provide two or three years of study. The students will enter Oxford University in England next October.

Pravin Rajan plans to pursue a doctorate in philosophy and international relations, Sandhya Rajan said this morning.

She said her son will spend time at his post as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve, assigned to the Officer Selection Office Hyattsville in College Park, MD.

Then he will head to Oxford for his study. "I am very proud," Sandhya Rajan said.

According to a Georgetown University release, Georgetown Fellowship Secretary and Professor of English John Glavin endorsed Rajan because "he's the person in his class who most fully internalizes the Jesuit ideal. The Jesuits were founded by a soldier, and their practice, as it were, theologizes a military ideal, of self-sacrifice . . . for the good of others. Since as a non-Catholic, he couldn't be a Jesuit, he chose the next logical option."

Georgetown said Rajan spent last summer working at Sandia National Laboratories as a consultant on the DARWARS project, creating materials that will be used to train Marines and soldiers on the human-centric elements of counterinsurgency operations.

"The tools we need are those which my upbringing and my education have entrusted to me: sympathy to histories not our own; attention to grievances, local in origin but potentially global in impact; curiosity about cultures which appear, at first alien and even hostile," Rajan said in the release.

Georgetown said Rajan was active in student government and started the school's first group of men targeting sexual assault.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.