Anthony Chatelain '96 grew up in Sweden and had never heard of Fairfield University until another student in his hometown of Enköping visited the campus in preparation for spending a semester at Fairfield as an exchange student.

"I took her word for it that it was a good experience," recalled Anthony, who subsequently entered Fairfield in an exchange program himself. The experience was a positive one and so he matriculated as a physics major. The success of his journey across the sea is perhaps best demonstrated by the five-year fully-funded grant that the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has offered him to study for his doctorate in nuclear engineering. He will enter the program this September.

The son of a Swedish mother and a Haitian father, Anthony was born in the United States but moved with his family to Sweden when he was two years old. Raised in a multilingual home, he was fluent in Swedish and English and spoke some French. He enjoyed language and to perfect his ability to speak in his father's native tongue, he spent his junior year studying at the University of Grenoble in France.

During his freshman year at Fairfield he was on the crew team and for much of his college career he was a tutor and resident advisor for Upward Bound, a program that helps disadvantaged students qualify for college and encourages their college and career goals. But as the middle child in a family of five children and the first to attend college, he always placed a high priority on his studies. The result has been a bachelor's degree in physics, awarded magna cum laude, and now this opportunity to pursue his doctorate at MIT.

He says that Dr. Evangelos Hadjimichael, former chair of the Physics Department and now Dean of Fairfield's BEI School of Engineering, whose intelligence he admires, "has been a great influence on me." Anthony will be following a career path similar to Dr. Hadimichael's whose expertise is in nuclear physics.

Enhancing Anthony's classroom work has been his work for two summers in Sweden as a student practical trainee in the nuclear fuel department at ABB Atom, a nuclear engineering power company which helps supply electricity all over the world. He is spending this summer there again before moving on to MIT.

While preparing for graduate school, Anthony spent this past year as Tutor-Coordinator for the Upward Bound Program on campus.

Posted On: 07-01-1997 09:07 AM

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