Fellowship winners will continue their studies in England

The fellowships support graduate study at Oxford and Cambridge universities in the U.K.
2023 Oxbridge fellowship winners

Top row, Shaezmina Khan, Elizabeth Hopkinson, Tyler Jager. Middle row, Beasie Goddu, Hamzah Jhaveri, Aidan Evans, and Katie Painter. Bottom row, Danielle Castro, Melissa Wang, Ethan Pesikoff, and Debbie Dada.

Nine Yale seniors and two recent graduates have been awarded fellowships for graduate study at the universities of Oxford or Cambridge in the United Kingdom.

These fellowship recipients are in addition to the students previously announced in Yale News who have won Rhodes and Marshall Scholarships.

The fellowship winners and their awards are:

Danielle Castro has received a Paul Mellon Fellowship to pursue an M.Phil. in population health sciences at the University of Cambridge. Next month, she will graduate from Yale with a certificate in global health and a joint B.S./M.S. degree in molecular biochemistry. Her thesis is on the development of novel drug candidates for chordoma spine cancers in the laboratory of Craig Crews, the John C. Malone Professor of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology. She has a strong connection to her Peruvian and Indigenous heritage, and is passionate about social justice and reducing health inequities. She has worked toward this goal while interning in the New Haven Public Schools, serving on the board of the HAVEN Free Clinic, and conducting public health research in Connecticut and the Peruvian Amazon. She enjoys meeting and mentoring other first-generation immigrant and low-income students, especially in her role as co-president of Latina Women at Yale.

Debbie “Dada” Dada was awarded a Clarendon Scholarship to pursue a M.Sc. in translational health sciences at the University of Oxford. Dada graduated in December 2021 from Yale College where she double majored in the history of science, medicine & public health , and in African studies while in the Global Health Scholars Program at the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs (then called the Jackson Institute). During her time at Yale she completed four research assistantships at the Yale School of Nursing, Yale School of Public Health, the Yale Institute of Global Health and the Dakar-based Global Research and Advocacy Network on HIV and COVID-19 in Ghana, Senegal, Chad, Canada and the U.S. She is passionate about implementation science and global health justice and looks forward to continuing her studies on infectious disease prevention among marginalized populations in West Africa at Oxford through translational health sciences. She hopes to have a career improving health equity within Sub-Saharan Africa and African diasporic communities using implementation science research.

Aidan Evans has been awarded a Huawei Hisilicon Scholarship to earn a Ph.D. in computer science at the University of Cambridge. He is majoring in computer science and philosophy at Yale and additionally is completing a B.S./M.S. in computer science. During his time at Yale he published research on quantum computing at the premier conference on software engineering. He has also served as a teaching assistant for seven courses, ranging from those on systems programming  and computer organization to graduate courses on the interplay of computer science with law. Most recently he has taken on the project of writing a book on the history of Yale’s computer science department. At Cambridge, he will study the logic and the foundations of computer science under the supervision of Professor Anuj Dawar.

Beasie Goddu was awarded a Paul Mellon Fellowship for graduate study at the University of Cambridge, where she will pursue an M.Phil. in English literature. She will examine the portrayal of women’s rights in early 20th-century British fiction. She is majoring in English at Yale with a concentration in creative writing. Her academic thesis explored women’s agency over physical space in the works of Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster. Her creative writing thesis is a collection of essays about vision. She serves as a writing partner at Yale’s Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning, is a senior editor of The New Journal, a student-run magazine that features creative nonfiction, and is an undergraduate editorial fellow at The Yale Review. She is also president of St. Anthony Hall, an arts and literary society. She aspires to a career in editing, highlighting marginalized female voices.

Tyler Jager was awarded a King’s-Yale Fellowship to pursue an M.Phil. in political thought and intellectual history at the University of Cambridge. He will focus on early 20th-century history and efforts to restrict migration and the freedom of movement, particularly in the British Empire. He will graduate from Yale with a joint B.A./M.A. degree in political science and a certificate in human rights. He was the 2022 winner of the Elie Wiesel Prize in Ethics for an essay he wrote on aid workers in the Mediterranean. He has also written about that topic, tenant organization, and lead poisoning in New Haven for a number of campus and national publications, and currently serves as co-editor of BRINK, Yale’s undergraduate book review. His senior thesis, an ethnographic study in Greece, explored how aid workers’ presence in host communities affects anti-refugee prejudice in European Union external border zones. Jager is a tour guide at the Yale University Art Gallery and was the coordinator of the Yale Hunger and Homelessness Action Project Fast, the university’s largest student fundraiser. He has interned at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and at the journal Foreign Affairs.

Hamzah Jhaveri has received a Keasbey Scholarship to pursue an M.Phil. in social anthropology at the University of Cambridge. At Yale, he majored in anthropology, with a particular interest  in the study of moral economics and the corporate form. He has been researching gun culture and commerce in America, and his senior thesis investigates the transformation of the gun-making trade in an early American settlement in Pennsylvania known for its pacifist religious values and socialist economy. Jhaveri served as the editor-in-chief of the Yale Herald, wrote and performed with sketch company groups including the Fifth Humor and Playspace, and has been an organizer with the Yale Endowment Justice Coalition, Sunrise New Haven (the local chapter of a national movement to stop the climate crisis and create millions of new jobs), and New Haven Rising (a community organization dedicated to achieving economic, racial, and social justice through collective action). He has spent summers teaching fifth-graders  about climate organizing, interning at a First Amendment law firm, researching petrochemical companies, and harvesting micro greens at an urban hydroponics farm.

Elizabeth Hopkinson was awarded a Paul Mellon Fellowship to pursue an M.Phil. in health, medicine, and society at Clare College, Cambridge. She graduated from Yale in December 2022 with a B.A. in environmental studies. Her senior thesis explored end-of-life care using geographic concepts of place and place-making. At Cambridge, she will continue to study how places affect experiences of aging, dying, and disability. She was a leader of FOOT (First-year Orientation Trips), was a first-year counselor in Jonathan Edwards College, a Yale Daily News editor, and a research assistant at the Yale School of Nursing and in the Human Nature Lab. During the height of the COVID pandemic, she worked as an EMT near her home in Westborough, Massachusetts.

Shaezmina Khan has been awarded the Rotary Global Grant Scholarship to pursue an M.Sc. in global governance and diplomacy from the University of Oxford. She is majoring in global affairs at Yale and will obtain a certificate in human rights from Yale Law School. For her senior capstone, Khan worked for the Afghanistan War Commission and assessed U.S. diplomatic efforts to achieve political settlement in Afghanistan between 2002 and 2021. At Oxford, she hopes to focus her research on regional security dilemmas and conflict mediation in the Afghanistan-Pakistan-India region. She is passionate about American foreign policy, national security, diplomacy, and peacebuilding in the Middle East and North Africa region. She served as a policy trainee at the European Commission in Brussels and as a legislative intern for U.S. Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro in Washington, D.C. She served as the executive director of the Yale International Relations Association and president of the Muslim Students Association, and was a research assistant at both the Yale Law School and the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs.

Katie Painter has received a Rotary Global Grant to pursue an M.Phil. in religion and theology at the University of Oxford. She will graduate in May with a B.A./M.A. in classics and a second B.A. in religious studies. Her senior thesis focuses on the Latin hymns of St. Ambrose of Milan, illuminating their engagement with the varied literary and intellectual landscape of the Late Antique Mediterranean world. At Yale, Katie has mentored New Haven high school students through New Haven REACH, tutored at St. Martin de Porres Academy, worked as a residential teaching assistant with Yale’s Citizens Thinkers Writers program, and co-chaired the Undergraduate Council at St. Thomas More. She presented her linguistics research at the International Conference on the Voynich Manuscript in December 2022 and currently serves as co-managing editor of Helicon: the Yale Undergraduate Journal of Classics and as an editor for the Yale Historical Review. She is passionate about peace-building efforts and interreligious dialogue and hopes to use her degree to mobilize the study of the ancient past for the benefit of our contemporary world. She looks forward to working on research ventures at Oxford’s Las Casas Institute for Social Justice such as “A Future of the Humanities” and “Dignity in the Religious Traditions.”

Ethan Pesikoff received a Henry Fellowship to earn a Master of Advanced Studies (MASt) degree in pure mathematics at the University of Cambridge. At Yale, he is majoring in both mathematics and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations (NELC). He served on the board of the Yale Undergraduate Math Society, which organizes academic support and social activities for students, and he conducted original mathematical research at Williams College and the University of Minnesota during summer breaks. His senior thesis for NELC seeks to understand previously untranslated Akkadian texts from the early second millennium BCE. After completing his MASt at Cambridge, Pesikoff plans to pursue a Ph.D. in mathematics.

Melissa Wang was awarded a Paul Mellon Fellowship to pursue an M.Phil. in U.S. history at the University of Cambridge, where she will study the consolidation of correctional officer power in late 20th-century America and its effect on mass incarceration policy and prisoners’ lives. Her research is intended to place correctional officers within a broader history of American law enforcement, militarism, and race. At Yale, she is majoring in history, and ethnicity, race, and migration, and is a scholar in the Multidisciplinary Academic Program in Human Rights. She has served on the board of the Yale Undergraduate Prison Project (YUPP) and Yale Women’s Center, and captains the Yale club Wushu team. Her research interests were inspired by work with the Stop Solitary Connecticut’s legislative campaign as a project leader at YUPP and as a research assistant at the Yale Law School Lowenstein Clinic. A painter, she is also a volunteer with Justice Arts Coalition, a national network and resource for those creating art in and around the criminal legal system.

This story has been updated to include Yale College senior Katie Painter and December 2021 graduate Debbie Dada, who were accidentally omitted in the original story.

This is a complete list of Yale-affiliated recipients of these fellowships to the best of our knowledge. If you know of someone on the list we missed, let us know

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