Long Grove resident wins Purple Heart scholarship

Naomi Ecanow, a University of Illinois at Chicago senior from Long Grove, Illinois, has been awarded a $2,500 scholarship from the Military Order of the Purple Heart, a congressionally-chartered organization of recipients of the Purple Heart medal (combat-wounded military personnel) and their families.

Ecanow, who is majoring in biochemistry in the UIC College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and a member of the UIC Honors College, is among approximately 80 winners of the organization's competitive scholarship awarded annually to Purple Heart recipients and their spouses, children and grandchildren.

Ecanow's qualifying Purple Heart recipient was her late grandfather, Bernard Ecanow, who was a longtime faculty member of the UIC College of Pharmacy and a recipient of both the Bronze Star and the Purple Heart for service in the Pacific during World War II.

She is in UIC's Guaranteed Professional Admission Program in Medicine and plans to attend the UIC College of Medicine after graduation. Her application for the scholarship was supported by Ralph Keen, dean of the Honors College and a hereditary member of the organization, and Robert Paul Malchow, UIC associate professor of biological sciences.

Ecanow is a graduate of Adlai E. Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire, Illinois.