NEW YORK — The late Dolores Zohrab Liebmann was the daughter of the great early 20th-century Armenian intellectual, writer, and statesman Krikor Zohrab. During her lifetime, Liebmann supported students and educational and charitable organizations, with a primary concern to attract and support students with outstanding character and ability, who would hold promise for achievement and distinction in their chosen fields of study.
Through a generous bequest at her death, Liebmann created a perpetual charitable trust designated as “The Dolores Zohrab Liebmann Fund” for the purpose of funding advanced education and graduate study grants, which must be carried out entirely in the United States of America.
Beginning in 2022, the Trustees of the Liebmann Fund, at the suggestion of the Selection Committee, decided that the Eastern Diocese would be among the select institutions eligible to nominate one candidate per year for the Dolores Zohrab Liebmann Graduate Fellowship.
The Eastern Diocese is pleased to announce that Arthur Ipek, a master’s student in Cognitive Neuroscience at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, has been awarded the Dolores Zohrab Liebmann Fund Fellowship for academic year 2023–2024. Fellowships cover the cost of tuition and provide an annual $18,000 stipend for living expenses.
In 2020, Ipek earned two Bachelor of Arts degrees from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in psychology and linguistics. While still a high school student, he began interning at the Zohrab Information Center, where he worked for several years between 2015–2017. He has also taught music at Holy Martyrs Armenian Language School. On June 4 of this year, he was ordained to the diaconate at Saint Gregory the Illuminator Armenian Church (White Plains, NY), where he has played the organ and served at the altar since 2020.
With experience in both natural languages (e.g., Armenian, Turkish, French) and programming languages (e.g., Python, R, SPSS), Ipek is currently pursuing courses in behavioral neuroscience, the cognitive neuroscience of memory, and psycholinguistics during his master’s program. He is also conducting research at the intersection of language, perception, and cognition, conducting studies that measure brain waves upon humans presented with sentences to process.
