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When Ahti Westphal visited Cambodia for the first time, he felt like he'd walked into an issue of National Geographic. "The colors, the decorations, the festivals that were very different from anything I'd even seen—it completely blew me away," says Westphal, a master's student in sustainable design and a recipient of a Walter H. Judd Fellowship for international study and project-based learning.
Westphal spent 10 weeks in central Cambodia working with the local community to design a library and cultural center to preserve the ancient language of Cham, which is still spoken in the region but is being rapidly displaced by more widely spoken languages such as Vietnamese and Khmer.
One major consideration for the community center was that it be welcoming to Cham people of all religions, meaning that it had to be secular in both purpose and design. The design Westphal came up with is inspired by secular Cambodian structures such as schools, mansions, and buildings with central courtyards. The next step is to raise funds for the project and see it through to completion.
"The U of M has been very generous to me, and I'm very thankful," he says. "I could not have had more support, better faculty, and better opportunities in terms of fellowships."
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For fiscal year 2007, the University received $619 million in research awards, an increase of 7.5 percent compared with the previous year.