Golden Bears Awarded Geballe Scholarships

Fien van Westreenen, left, and Hannah Cooper were each awarded Geballe Scholarships for their postgraduate studies.

News5/22/2024 1:00 PM | By: Cal Athletics

Cooper, van Westreenen To Receive $10,000 For Postgraduate Studies

BERKELEY – Two outgoing Cal student-athletes have each been awarded the Oscar and Theodore Geballe Postgraduate Scholarship for their combination of excellence in both academics and athletic competition.

Hannah Cooper of women’s soccer and Fien van Westreenen of women’s rowing will each be awarded a $10,000 stipend for their postgraduate studies.

The Oscar and Theodore Geballe Award was created through the generosity of Dr. Theodore Geballe to honor his father, Oscar Geballe, and recognizes his strong belief in the value of combining scholarship and intercollegiate athletic competition. There have now been 106 Geballe Award winners since 1981.

Cooper majored in data science with a minor in science, technology and society. While a series of injuries limited her on-field production at Cal, Cooper was a three-time selection on the Pac-12 Fall Academic Honor Roll and was named a Neufeld Scholar-Athlete, given annually to the graduating male and female student-athletes at Cal with the highest cumulative grade-point averages. After being part of the first graduating class of Cal’s College of Computing, Data Science and Society, Cooper will attend Imperial College in London in the fall to pursue a master’s degree in health data analytics and machine learning.

Van Westreenen double-majored in cognitive science and psychology at Cal and is a three-time member of the Pac-12 Spring Academic Honor Roll while twice has been selected as a CRCA Scholar-Athlete. Van Westereenen was named a Second-Team All-American last season and is also an All-Pac-12 selection. She spent this year as a research assistant at the marketing lab in the Haas School of Business and hopes to enroll in a master’s program at Vrije University in her hometown of Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Van Westreenen and the Bears earned an at-large berth to the NCAA Championships on Tuesday after finishing second at last weekend’s Pac-12 Championships. The NCAA Championships take place May 31-June 2 in Bethel, Ohio.