Two students of the City University of New York were named Rhodes Scholars on Saturday, a stunning feat for the public university system.

The winners, Lev Sviridov of City College and Eugene Shenderov of Brooklyn College, are both chemistry majors and immigrants, whose families fled countries that were formerly part of the Soviet Union. Both have also lived through dire times.

Mr. Sviridov and his mother were often homeless when they first arrived in America. Mr. Shenderov was home-schooled throughout his elementary school years because of an immune deficiency disorder.

CUNY’s victory is a triumph for a university system that has aggressively sought to improve its reputation in part by seeking out a more competitive student body.

Calling to mind the period decades ago when City College was known as “the poor man’s Harvard,” CUNY’s coup is also a testament to the academic strength of the university’s immigrant population, which makes up about half of the student body.

“This is an historic moment for CUNY and for New York,” CUNY’s chancellor, Matthew Goldstein, said in a statement. “Our newest Rhodes Scholars are shining examples of how CUNY today is renewing its enduring commitment to the advancement of immigrants – and all New Yorkers – through public higher education.”

This marks the first time a student from the city’s public-university system won a Rhodes Scholarship since 1992, when Brooklyn College’s Lisette Nieves won,and it was the first time two CUNY students won in the same year.

Students from Columbia University and New York University were not among this year’s 32 winners, while scholarships went to five Harvard University students. A University of Chicago student from Brooklyn, Ian Desai, also won higher education’s most coveted scholarship, which was established in 1904.

Mr. Shenderov, 21, is a senior at Brooklyn College who has minors in nutrition, biochemistry, and biology.

Born in Chernovtsy, Ukraine, he moved to America with his parents and grandparents in February 1990 with a refugee visa, granted because the family is Jewish.

At Oxford, Mr. Shenderov said, he plans to research how “to educate the immune system to attack and eradicate cancer,” earning a D.Phil. – the equivalent of a Ph.D. – in tumor immunology.

When he was a junior at Edward R. Murrow High School in Brooklyn on 16th Avenue, Mr. Shenderov ran research projects at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan, where his parents worked.

A 4.0 student at Brooklyn, Mr. Shenderov is also a varsity tennis player and president of the college’s chess team – which recently placed fifth out of 30 colleges in the Pan-American Intercollegiate Team Chess Championship – and he has worked as an Emergency Medical Service driver since his freshman year, when he passed the EMS exam.

Attending Brooklyn on a full scholarship, Mr. Shenderov said: “If a student is motivated, going to a school like Harvard or CUNY will end up with the same result.”

“The students make the school,” he said,”and the school is there to provide the opportunities.”

From an early age, Mr. Shenderov said, he was “instilled with the sense that a person should strive for knowledge for the sake of knowledge.”

A resident of Washington Heights, Mr. Sviridov, who suffers from asthma, plans to study inorganic chemistry at Oxford to learn more about how pollutants react with the human body. He said he is interested in developing safer aerosols that will lead to a decrease in pollution.

Mr. Sviridov, 22, moved to America from Moscow in 1993 with his mother, who is a single parent and a journalist.

“If we couldn’t find a place to sleep, we would spend the night wandering around Manhattan just trying to keep our feet moving,” he said. He learned English while playing softball in Central Park, according to the Web site of the Rhodes Trust.

Mr. Sviridov said he chose City College “because I could afford it” and took advantage of a program at the college that allows students to get paid to conduct research alongside faculty members. He said the science faculty “really embraced” him when he first visited the school as a Science Olympiad competitor in his senior year in high school. Mr. Sviridov was also president of City College’s student government last year.

“We could not be more proud of Lev,” Gregory Williams, president of CCNY, said, “and no one deserves this honor more. An immigrant who came to America with nothing, he has received one of the highest academic honors open to a young man or woman. He stands for the great promise of The City College, and of public education.”

Since 1999, Mr. Sviridov has served as a translator and permanent member of the Glasnost Public Foundation’s delegation to the United Nations. As part of his service to the Foundation, a nongovernment Russian human-rights organization, Mr. Sviridov has been interviewed numerous times by BBC/Europe.

Mr. Sviridov received the 2004 Goldwater Fellowship in Science for his outstanding scholastic work and research in computational biophysical chemistry at City. He attended the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York City.