New York - The fifteen year-old daughter of Madonna and Carlos Manuel Leon has won a scholarship to study Social Anthropology at the prestigious University of London college.
A phone call to the Ciccone family's Manhattan residence this weekend confirmed Lourdes - or Lola as she likes to be known - is the proud winner of the extremely prestigious Professor von Fürer-Haimendorf Scholarship of 2012.
The bursary is only awarded once every ten years to outstanding students wishing to study the use of film and photography 'as ethnographic tools' - an area of expertise for which the late Prof was world famous. [No kidding! - 'Ed']
Three years of intensive study begins this September just before Lourdes' 16th birthday which means, of course, she will require a chaperone for the first year of study at the Thornhaugh 'Thorn-ho'] Street campus, next door to the Institute of Education [sic].
No problem, of course, considering her famous mother's already hired a 12-strong squad of ex-Paras to guard her precious munchkin 24/7 - something that Lourdes has taken on the chin like a responsible young trustafarian.
Announcing the scholarship this afternoon a SOAS lecturer said that Lourdes will be joining a band of extremely famous people who have studied at the internationally acclaimed college for over 100 years.
"We're immensely proud of our alumni," Professor Dr Partridge Hoggscroft-Puccini, RA, commented to reporters.
"We're especially chuffed at our ties to extraordinary men and women such as Barack Husain Obama Senior," the academic continued, "who ran ragged our Swahili Department back in '69 as a young Visiting Professor of Hegemony Blarneyisms.
"Emperor Haile 'The Lion of Judah' Selassie, too, was an accomplished undergraduate majoring magna cum laude in our Hydroponics and Mysticism foundation course.
"I could go on, the list is endless."
Part of Lourdes' course will be spent in a one year visit to an African or Asian country of her choice where she can hone those fledgeling interests in film and photography 'as ethnographic tools'.
Malawi of course comes to mind given that it's her step brother David's country of birth before adoption took him to the dizzying heights of Manhattan, LA and London's Mayfair.
But it's the Bantu states of East African that hold most appeal for budding anthropologist Lola, maybe due to a fascination with the US President's bloodline roots.
"Nah, that's bollox," a linguistics postgrad tweeted from the SOAS cafeteria this evening.
"The closest Lourdes will ever get to some far off ethnographic mongraph kinda place on the Dark Continent will be the Uni swimming pool in Mallet Street where that Christmas Day pants bomber used to hang out."
That's where famous SOAS alumna and Burmese politician Aung San Suu Kyi apparently first learned to do the breast stroke before competing in the College's well known yellow and bronze colors at the Commonwealth Games of 1932.
That's the year that ex-US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright famously won the women's shot-put during a sabbatical studying endangered species.
Richard Dawkins is 169.
