Robert Barker/University Photography

Jaffa Panken '05, right, a history major graduating this month from Cornell, shares a light moment with Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Cornell professor of history, human development and gender studies, in Brumberg's office in April. Before Panken came to Cornell, she thought of Brumberg as a role model; once at Cornell, Panken's research eventually led her to Brumberg, for whom she worked as a research assistant on a study on self-injurious behavior.

ITHACA, N.Y. -- Jaffa Panken is a hands-on person who doesn't take her place in the scheme of things for granted. Whether it involves getting up to her elbows in primary sources as a researcher or answering a distress call as a certified emergency medical technician, Panken prefers to be in the thick of it.

"When I began to consider the disparity between how my life as a woman might have been a hundred years ago and how it is today, I became very interested in how I got to be where I am," she says.

Given Panken's talents, intelligence and love of academic detective work, that could be just about anywhere. Next fall it will be the University of Pennsylvania, where she will pursue a doctorate in gender studies in late 19th- and early 20th-century American cultural history.

Panken, a Cornell University history major from Baltimore, Md., was one of 85 students nationwide to receive the 2005 Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in Humanistic Studies, awarded by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. The fellowship covers tuition and required fees for the first academic year of graduate school, including a stipend of $17,500. She also has been awarded a Benjamin Franklin Fellowship at Penn for 2006-11. At Cornell, Panken recently received the Lustig Prize for an outstanding history major continuing on to graduate study, and the Lang Prize for best honors thesis on American history for 2005. Her honors thesis, "Behind the Mirror Image: Urie Bronfenbrenner in the Soviet Union," grew out of Panken's archival work in Cornell's Urie Bronfenbrenner Collection.

Her desire to understand the role of gender in society led her to Joan Jacobs Brumberg, the Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow and Cornell professor of history, human development and gender studies. Panken later became a research assistant for Brumberg for a project on self-injurious behavior.

"Professor Brumberg was my role model before I came to Cornell," says Panken, who, as a high school student, read Brumberg's landmark research works "The Body Project" and "Fasting Girls." Uncertain how to direct her studies, Panken took a summer job in the Kroch Library's Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections in 2003. Her charge: organize the papers of the late Robert T. Clausen, a professor of biology at Cornell.

"They put me in a vault: I was alone, I was cold and I started going through the files -- it was my first real experience with primary documents -- and I found myself totally absorbed in the process," she says. "I could watch how someone's life developed, follow the arc of their career, chart their transition from active living people to the dead alumni file. It was fascinating."

Out of the Kroch vault, a research scholar emerged. In fall 2003, serendipitously, she got a job archiving the Bronfenbrenner Collection, which led her to her honors thesis -- and to other projects with Brumberg, "and everything snowballed from there," Panken says.

Brumberg later recommended Panken for the Mellon.

"Jaffa has been a delight to teach and to know and to watch grow as a young historian," says Brumberg. "Her academic career at Cornell has been embedded in the institution itself: Urie Bronfebrenner was a student of Carl Becker -- a preeminent American historian. Jaffa's attention to Bronfenbrenner's Cold War work is very significant in terms of history and to Cornell."