BERKELEY – The 2017 Geballe Award recipients serve as impeccable examples of resilience in the face of adversity.

Both Serena Leong of Cal's women's gymnastics team and Elliott Gentile of the Golden Bears women's soccer program saw promising athletic careers limited by injury. But that didn't prevent them – or maybe even inspired them – from making an impact in other ways; most notably, the classroom.

Leong and Gentile each received the 2017 Geballe Award, given annually to Cal student-athletes that exemplify the combination scholarship and competition. The award comes with a $10,000 post-graduate scholarship.

"The Geballe awards are given to assist outstanding varsity athletes who are also outstanding students and want to continue on to graduate school after graduating from Cal," said Dr. Theodore Geballe, who created the award in honor of his father Oscar, an alumnus of the Hastings College of Law in 1912. "I believe that the achievements of this year's winners, Serena Leong and Elliott Gentile, are perfect examples of the purpose of the award. I congratulate them."

Leong and Gentile graduated after the fall semester and both are getting ready to continue their education in Master's programs. Leong, a bioengineering major who left Cal with a cumulative 3.85 GPA, begins the Masters of Translational Medicine program taught jointly by UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco in the fall. Leong will study tissue engineering and biomedical device development.

While at Cal, Leong focused her research and studies on the design and optimization of a microfluidic device to enable diagnosis and targeted therapy for cancer patients. She developed and tested her own protocols and designs, and co-authored a scientific paper about her findings.

Leong was Cal's first-ever Pac-12 Freshman of the Year recipient in women's gymnastics in 2013 but appeared in only four meets during her junior and senior seasons because of multiple Achilles injuries. She was a two-time NACGCW Scholastic All-American.

Gentile also graduated in the fall with a double-major in Media Studies and Sociology. In the fall, she begins a Master's program in Mass Communications at the University of North Carolina, where she was one of eight incoming graduate students to receive the prestigious Roy H. Park Fellowship – given to the most qualified students at the UNC School of Media and Journalism in terms of test scores, grades and previous professional and academic experience.

Gentile played sparingly during her Cal career due to injuries, including missing two full seasons.

Since 1981, there have now been 92 Golden Bears who have received the Geballe Award and the accompanying scholarship to further their education.