RALEIGH — An MIT student from Leicester who is days away from graduation and a University of North Carolina senior from Cary were among the 32 Americans selected as Rhodes Scholars for 2009.

Winners Alia Whitney-Johnson and Aisha I. Saad were officially announced on Sunday.

Whitney-Johnson will graduate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in December, majoring in civil and environmental engineering. She is a Truman Scholar who was also named as one of Glamour Magazine’s top 10 college women in 2007.

In 2005, Whitney-Johnson founded a nonprofit business, Emerge Global, which seeks to empower young Sri Lankan mothers made pregnant through rape and incest. She has remained its executive director as it has won worldwide recognition.

Whitney-Johnson has also led many other programs relating to poverty, women’s rights, and race relations. Her focus at Oxford University will be development studies.

“We’re very proud of Aria. She is a very beautiful human being inside and out,” said her mother, Angela Whitney.

Saad is majoring in environmental health science and Spanish at UNC-Chapel Hill. At Oxford, she will focus on nature, society and environmental policy.

A native of Cairo, Saad emigrated to the United States when she was 6. She has has published articles in two major medical and health care journals, and interned in the blood diseases ward at Cairo University’s teaching hospitals and with the Peruvian Ministry of Health.

Saad has also been a leader of the Muslim Students’ Association and has spearheaded important inter-faith dialogues on the UNC campus.

She was the first candidate to be interviewed in Atlanta, speaking to the committee at 8 a.m.

“The interview was very conversational, a lot less difficult than the campus interviews had been,” Saad said. “They made a great effort to make it be an open and honest conversation. I think they got to see a lot of how I think instead of what I know.”

Candidates had to wait another three hours after the interviews concluded before the decisions were announced. Saad said there were “lots of board games just to pass the time.”

After her selection, she said her family joined in the celebration.

“It really feels like a win for the team,” she said.

Parker Goyer, who graduated from Duke University in 2007, was also named as a Rhodes Scholar. She told The Birmingham (Ala.) News in a story Sunday she hopes to build on a program she started this year called “Coach for College,” in which college athletes go to a foreign country to work with middle school-aged children.

Goyer, who played tennis at Duke, is the school’s 42nd Rhodes scholar, the 21st in the last 15 years and fifth student-athlete to earn the honor.

This summer, athletes from Duke University and the University of North Carolina went to Vietnam for a pair of three-week sessions.

The scholarships, the oldest of the international study awards available to American students, provide two or three years of study. The students will enter Oxford University in England next October.