Pooja Kumar, who has spent months in refugee camps across the globe in the past decade, was chosen along with 31 other Americans as a Rhodes scholar on Saturday. She will study international relations at the Oxford University from October.

In a way, she could be following Atul Gawande, a medical doctor from the Harvard University, who studied philosophy and ethics at the Oxford University nearly two decades ago. Gawande is also a distinguished author, having published many essays in The New Yorker and a much-praised memoir, Complications.

"Right from my childhood my parents had instilled in me the value of giving back to society," Kumar, whose parents live in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, had earlier said in an interview.

A second year medical student at the Harvard University, Kumar was one of the most recognised of the Duke University students. She has been featured in articles in a wide variety of publications, including Glamour magazine, which chose her as one of America's 10 most promising students a few years ago.

Kumar, who graduated from Duke with distinction in health policy and social values, has worked with the poor and dispossessed in Kolkata, and refugee camps in East Timor and Azerbaijan.

Kumar, who moved with her family from India to Singapore, Indonesia, Canada and the United States, was drawn to social work when she was in high school in Doylestown. She and her brother wrote a letter to Mother Teresa's nuns in Kolkata. During the summer before her senior year in high school, Kumar went to Kolkata. Her brother joined her, too. Also travelling with them was their grandmother, who helped them at Prem Dan, Mother Teresa's care facility.

"We lived in Calcutta when I was young, and I'd seen poverty from a distance," Kumar had said. "As I was growing up, I wanted to do something more than merely read about it.

"That was the most important experience I'd had. It directed me toward the field of international health."

Helped by a Duke University professor, she went to East Timor, paying her own airfare and expenses. With little more than a month to raise the money, she was able to secure a travel grant from the Duke's Center for International Studies and a John Hope Franklin award through the Center for Documentary Studies, according to the Duke University publications.

Persuading her parents to let her fly off to war-torn region was anything but easy. "It took a bit to get them to agree to let me go over there," she said soon after her return. "But they're getting used to the fact that I pick strange things like this and expect them to let me go."