Aisha Ihab Saad of Cary has trekked the Amazon region, hiked the Rockies and the Himalayas and climbed a volcano in Peru.

Now, these and other accomplishments, both academic and extracurricular, have helped boost the senior at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to the ultimate summit for college students. Saturday (Nov. 21), she was chosen as one of 32 Rhodes Scholars nationwide, an award that will take her to England for two to three years of graduate study at Oxford University.

The daughter of Ihab Saad and Shereen Elgamal of Cary, Saad will seek a master’s degree in nature, society and environmental policy at Oxford. She hopes eventually to go into environmental law and help build bridges of understanding among opposing groups to create solutions for sustainable global development.

“I plan to focus on fragmentation in international environmental law, toward shaping comprehensive legal structures that protect equitable resource allocation and development on a global scale,” she said.

Worldwide, about 85 Rhodes Scholars are selected annually in 14 jurisdictions. The scholarship funds tuition, fees and living expenses for two years, plus a third year at Oxford if needed for the degree desired. Its value averages about $50,000 per year and varies according to each student’s course of study.

Saad is the 42nd Rhodes Scholar from Carolina since the first awards were made in 1904 and the seventh in the last seven years. She has a Morehead-Cain Scholarship, a merit award funding all four undergraduate years and four summer enrichment experiences. Of 27 Rhodes Scholars from UNC since the first Morehead-Cains graduated in 1957, 24, including Saad, have been Morehead-Cain Scholars.

“Aisha embodies everything we want a Carolina education to be: great academic accomplishment, sophisticated understanding of the world and its problems and an unwavering commitment to addressing the great challenges,” said Chancellor Holden Thorp.

Saad, who graduated from J.H. Rose High School in Greenville, N.C., in 2005, is majoring in environmental health sciences in the UNC School of Public Health and Spanish in the College of Arts and Sciences. She is fluent in Arabic and Spanish and has reading proficiency in French and conversational proficiency in Hindi.

She established and coordinated a weekly Arabic Conversation Group on campus.

Saad is on track to graduate in May as a public service scholar – a student who, while at Carolina, has completed at least 300 hours of public service and met additional requirements. Her volunteer work has included teaching English to Spanish-speaking UNC employees.

She had her first global experience at the age of 6, when her family emigrated from Egypt to the United States. Saad since has become a naturalized citizen. The oldest of five children, she grew up learning the art of mediation. At Carolina, she has made connections among campus community members of different faiths, races and cultures, in part as outreach coordinator for the Muslim Students Association.

Through her Morehead-Cain Scholarship, Saad has interned with government ministries in Peru and in the blood diseases ward of Cairo University’s Teaching Hospitals. Her article on the latter experience was published in the September 2007 issue of the policy journal Health Affairs.

For her Morehead-Cain experience last summer, Saad interned with Cherokee Investment Partners, which works to redevelop contaminated land. The firm’s plan for cleaning the Union Carbide site in Bhopal, India, met a negative reception from activist groups there.

“When phone calls and e-mails from my desk in Raleigh brought no resolution, I stuffed my giant blue backpack, laced up my worn boots and headed to India,” Saad said. “Speeding through the contaminated slums surrounding the Union Carbide factory on the back of a motorcycle, I chased after personal stories … With the victim’s stories, I began to bridge the disparate perspectives of Cherokee’s team and the skeptical activists in Bhopal.”

Saad hopes to make similar efforts her life’s work. “The role of mediation is something I’d like to carry into my future career,” she said. “My experience with Cherokee allowed me to engage with diverse perspectives at an international level, in a capacity that I have not experienced before.”