It’s a first for URI: a graduate student has won the prestigious international award, which provides two years of funding to study anywhere in the UK.

Morgan Breene ’14, who grew up on a farm in West Greenwich, R.I., is one of 31 U.S. Marshall Scholars this year and the only one from Rhode Island or from a public institution in New England.

Breene, a history and anthro-pology Honors graduate who also trained here as an advanced scientific diver, has studied nineteenth-century sea battles in the Mediterranean and contributed to important underwater discoveries from the Napoleonic wars. She is now a member of an exclusive group that includes Supreme Court justices and Pulitzer Prize winners.

Currently pursuing a graduate certificate at URI in geographic information systems and remote sensing, she plans to use her award to pursue a master’s degree in maritime archaeology at the University of Southampton and another master’s in European history at University College London.

So what drives her to dive?

“I like to know why we do what we do, how we got to the present,” Breene says. “And I like to tell stories. What can a shipwreck tell you about the past? The coastal waters of New England are important to our identities as Americans, but the colonial history of the coast cannot be understood without understanding the corresponding social climate in England. The major archaeological finds of the next 100 years are going to be found underwater.”