Two Northwestern students are among the 12 nationwide winners of the Josephine De Kármán Fellowship Trust, with one student as NU’s first undergraduate recipient of the award in at least a decade.

The fellowship carries $20,000 for graduate students and $10,000 for undergraduate students to put toward their final year of study. Fellows are chosen from across all academic disciplines.

Music and Weinberg junior Yonatan Kahn is one of two undergraduate recipients from across the country, and fifth-year history graduate student Stephen Mak is one of 10 graduate fellows.

Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe, associate director of the Office of Fellowships, said she thinks Kahn is the first NU undergraduate recipient of the fellowship, at least since the office was established in 1998.

“It’s extraordinarily exciting,” said Lewis Pardoe, Weinberg ’92.

More than 600 students applied for this year’s fellowships. The De Kármán Foundation selects students who are academically accomplished, but also well-rounded, Lewis Pardoe said.

“They are not only at the top of their academic field but participate in the world at large in interesting and dynamic ways,” she said.

Kahn, a previous Goldwater Scholarship winner, studies physics and the French horn.

Mak is the third history student since 1998 to be chosen as a De Kármán fellow. His dissertation is titled “Enemy Aliens in a World at War” and analyzes U.S. foreign relations and immigration policy. He has worked for Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., and taught social studies in New York City’s Chinatown.

Dr. Theodore von Kármán, an aeronautics expert and teacher, was the first director of the Graduate Aeronautical Laboratories at the California Institute of Technology. He founded the fellowship in 1954 in memory of his late sister to “recognize and assist students whose scholastic achievements reflect Professor von Kármán’s high standards,” according to its Web site.