Scottsdale's Brielle Ruscitti recently graduated from Arizona State University with honors from Barrett, The Honors College, where she made an impact in academics, leadership and service as an undergraduate.

The student speaker at the Barrett, The Honors College convocation, on Dec. 13, at the Grady Gammage Auditorium on the ASU Tempe campus, she served as president of the Barrett Leadership and Service Team and as a change agent at Changemaker Central@ASU, two organizations focused on leadership, service and community solutions, according to a press release.

She founded SOLUR Bridge, a student-led organization dedicated to helping its members build the skills and knowledge to get involved in research, gain lab experience, and build a community of researchers.

Ruscitti was an undergraduate research assistant in the Neisewander Addiction Research Laboratory, studying the effects of receptor’s roles in substance use addiction, specifically cocaine addiction, in rats by measuring cocaine intake levels before abstinence and after resumption in a controlled environment, and based her honors thesis on this research.

She was involved with the Barrett Women’s League and was a teaching assistant for the honors college’s signature first-year seminar, The Human Event and was a Tillman Scholar, the release said. Her experiences, along with the classes she took, helped her develop new skills and different ways of thinking, the release said.

“One of the most important lessons I learned at ASU is the importance of interdisciplinary education and building a well-rounded skill set. Both in and outside of the classroom, I learned that being an effective problem solver and using different methods of thinking allow you to develop a deeper understanding of the problem and create a better solution,” Ruscitti said in the release.

Originally from Scottsdale, the release noted she was “reluctant to come to ASU,” because she was worried about being overwhelmed at a big university, but was satisfied with her decision after her freshman. She found smaller communities within the university that helped her feel more connected and involved.

“There are endless opportunities at ASU, not only in terms of coursework and majors to select, but also clubs and organizations to join, and work and volunteer positions to partake in. I jumped right in, got involved on campus, and found that Barrett, The Honors College, offered a tight-knit community within ASU,” she said.

She earned the Moeur Award and the New American University Provost Award; graduated summa cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in biological sciences (biology and society), a global health minor, and a certificate in evolutionary medicine from the School of Life Sciences.