The Linux Foundation has just named its five scholarship winners for 2013, and they’re all over the board, diverse in gender, race, and geography.

These five folks represent the best of more than 700 applicants across a variety of categories.

Linux Foundation, tell the audience what they’ve won!

The Linux Foundation’s Linux training program provides funds to developers and IT professionals who show incredible promise for building careers in Linux and shaping the future of the operating system but who otherwise do not have the ability to attend Linux Foundation training courses. Each scholarship covers the registration fees for a Linux training course from and a 30-minute mentoring session with a Linux Foundation training instructor.

Given the increased demand for Linux skills throughout the IT job market, Linux training remains important for many tech professionals, from networking gurus to data center engineers to sysadmins.

This year’s Linux Kernel Guru is Andrew Dahl, a file system engineer from Minnesota. In a statement on the news, he said, “I think what gets me most excited about Linux is the footprint my contributions to the Linux kernel can have. The code I contribute will run on millions of computers around the world.”

Sarah Kiden [pictured] from Uganda won the Women in Linux scholarship. She got started with Linux in 2010 and said she hopes “many more women will be encouraged to participate in Linux and open source software” by seeing other women recognized for their technological skills.

German sysadmin Abdelghani Ouchabane was recognized as the SysAdmin Superstar for 2013, and India’s Nandaja Varma, a Debian contributor, was named this year’s Whiz Kid.

“I believe girls can be better programmers. Inspiring at least one human being is my dream,” said Varma in a release about the scholarship.

Finally, Nam Pho, a U.S.-based researcher, has received the Do-Gooder scholarship. He is employed at a medical research university where he works on the Linux High Performance Computing environment. Due to budget cuts, his workplace isn’t able to offer as many opportunities for training, so this scholarship will enable Pho to get better tools and hopefully lead to new uses of Linux in science.

“I’ve been using Linux for a long time, and I’m both inspired and amazed at how much it has grown and matured over the years,” said Pho in a statement.