8 students to pursue social, political, computational sciences
Whether examining animal ethics, combating AI bias, or weighing the values essential to a functioning democracy, Harvard's newest Rhodes Scholars have made their mark across a wide expanse of disciplines. These eight seniors, representing four countries and several U.S. states, will continue their academic pursuits at the University of Oxford next year. They shared their plans, accomplishments, and what it was like to receive the news of their award.
Matthew Anzarouth was at home with family in Montreal when he got the phone call that he had won a Rhodes Scholarship for Canada. Anzarouth was one of two recipients from the region that includes Ontario, Quebec, and the Maritime provinces.
"I felt a mix of shock, excitement, and profound gratitude," Anzarouth said. "This opportunity is an extraordinary privilege, and I'm really keen to make the most of it."
Anzarouth is currently writing a thesis on Canadian federalism and multiculturalism, with an emphasis on language policy in Quebec and Indigenous self-determination. The Mather House resident is using political theory to examine the challenge of reconciling universal individual rights with group rights specific to Canada's national minorities.
"I'm using political theory as a way of understanding -- and hopefully better resolving -- the challenge of coexistence in a culturally diverse federation," Anzarouth said. "The thesis work has helped me stay engaged with my country's politics and reflect on how I want to contribute."
On campus, Anzarouth is an undergraduate research fellow at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, and an editor and podcast host for the Harvard Political Review.
At Oxford, he hopes to continue his studies of political theory, focusing on questions of how to balance competing claims for cultural preservation and how to balance power between legislative and judicial bodies of government. He hopes to eventually attend law school.
The summer after her first year on campus, Lena Ashooh worked as a research assistant in Puerto Rico, studying the impacts of natural disaster and trauma on the behavior of a colony of free-ranging macaque monkeys. It was a pivotal moment for the Kirkland House resident, who said it felt like observing an "extremely sophisticated society of individuals."
"That was where I initially had the idea that, were the conditions that animals are in to change completely, they might behave in ways that we never imagined," Ashooh said. "This led me, in philosophy, to working out how we might wrong animals in the beliefs we have about them and to be interested in how we're managing land, the decisions we're making about who has access to land, and who should be involved in the decision-making process."
Ashooh designed a special concentration in animal studies, combining political philosophy, government, and animal psychology. She is an undergraduate fellow at the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Ethics, has written for the Harvard Review of Philosophy, and co-founded Harvard College Animal Advocates. Off-campus, she works as a lab manager in animal cognition scientist Irene Pepperberg's parrot lab at Boston University.
"I say that to study animal studies is to study social injustice and gives us a new way of understanding how oppression and violence occurs, and how moral complacency and inaction occur," said Ashooh, who is planning to eventually attend law school. "One of the key questions that animal studies allows us to address is: How is it that people can be led to look at suffering and decide not to act on it?"
Ashooh hopes to study philosophy next year, focusing on the question of what it means to treat and respect an animal as an individual.
As an undergraduate researcher in different Harvard labs, Shahmir Aziz has analyzed the impact of physical exertion on the glycolytic levels of diabetes patients and has investigated nano-lipids as potential drug delivery //Just double-checking: Is this the right word?// vesicles. As an intern at Novo Nordisk, he has focused on optimization of drug-delivery processes.
He wants to keep working on the cutting edges of biotechnology, and he wants to help others do so as well, in his native Pakistan.
"In the long run, I hope to help start a culture of startups and biotech in Pakistan, so that students and other innovators can grow out their ideas," said the Adams House resident named one of two Rhodes Scholars for Pakistan.
A first-year course in quantitative physiology taught by Linsey Moyer solidified Aziz' chosen field of study. He also took courses in government and political philosophy, feeding an equal passion for international relations.
At Oxford, Aziz plans to pursue a master's in bioengineering, followed by a second degree in diplomacy and global governance -- arenas in which he's also made meaningful contributions on campus.
A member of the leadership team of Harvard's International Relations Council, Aziz helped the University's Model United Nations team win two major intercollegiate competitions. "The opportunity I have cherished most at Harvard has been to interact with students from all extremes and opposites of background, pursuing all nature of subjects, and dreaming all ranges of noble dreams," Aziz wrote in his scholarship application.
Some of those interactions have come in his four years playing Harvard Club Tennis, as a sports editor with The Harvard Crimson, and as a course assistant in the Department of Mathematics.
Tommy Barone wants to understand what people believe, and why.
Barone currently is studying what he calls a "crisis of liberalism," or the philosophical values essential to healthy democracy. In particular he's interested in how best to understand the beliefs of people engaging in illiberalism in democratic societies.
"It's so easy to create a narrative about why something important or worrying or disruptive in society is happening that serves your ends," Barone said. "I think it's a civic obligation that we listen to what people have to say and try to understand them. If you are trying to theorize something that involves people without speaking and listening to the people who are part of that phenomenon, you're going to be missing something."
Barone said that when he learned he had been named a Rhodes Scholar, all he could do was start "breathing heavily."
"I didn't cry until I called my parents," Barone recalled. "Then I cried. Then I had to get it together to talk to the judges afterward."
The Currier House resident, who hopes to pursue journalism in the future, is co-chair for the editorial board at The Crimson. Their coverage won first place for editorial writing in collegiate journalism in the Society of Professional Journalists' 2023 Mark of Excellence Awards.
"I've had the unique challenge, but also the really educational, enriching experience, of being tasked with bringing people together to have difficult discussions in one of the most challenging years on campus in decades," said Barone, who plans to study history at Oxford. "I've had the privilege to publish a really broad diversity of perspectives on a range of important issues on campus."
From watching her mother commute several hours a day for work in Maryland to biking throughout her community, Sofia Corona learned early on that how people move is fundamental to the human experience.
Helping people get where they need to go -- within cities, towns, and systems that benefit all -- has become her life's work. "I'm interested in how communities are engaged in infrastructure planning, especially when the benefits of that infrastructure are collective and widespread, but the burdens are localized," said Corona, a Currier House resident graduating in December.
Corona, who hopes to work in the transportation sector, thinks seismic shifts toward sustainable modes of transportation are possible. "At the same time, our transportation networks are often superimposed on inherited, segregated landscapes, both racially and socioeconomically," she said. "We can't be agnostic to that."
At Oxford, Corona's master's coursework will contextualize mobility systems within broader economic development and sustainability frameworks. At Harvard, she worked in the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation, conducting research on inclusive decision-making in renewable energy projects. She also spent time in the MIT Transit Lab. Her professional experience includes internships at Uber, BMW, the U.S. Department of Transportation, and McKinsey & Co.
Her interests have taken her all over the world, from working on carbon dioxide pricing for the Chilean Ministry of Finance to collaborating with researchers at the Technical University of Munich on a tool that advises local transit agencies.
The Colombian American was a walk-on on Harvard's varsity sailing team and is an avid mountaineer with the summits of Denali and Kilimanjaro among her feats, and she has run the Boston, New York, and Berlin marathons. Among her most cherished moments at Harvard have been as a dog-walker to Currier House dogs Huckleberry and Ari.
Waiting in a room with other Rhodes Scholar finalists, Aneesh Muppidi did a homework problem set and chatted about South Asian politics, having already made peace with not winning.
"In my head I thought, 'This has been an amazing process, but now it's time to go back to the real world,'" the Lowell House resident said.
Then, he heard his name.
"I called my little brother first," he said, followed by his parents and two best friends.
Muppidi has spent time mulling the question Alan Turing famously posed in 1950: Can machines think? He's come to believe that understanding human intelligence -- and computationally scaling up that intelligence -- can solve some of the world's biggest problems, such as diagnosing complex medical conditions or giving personalized tutors to every child in every classroom.
At Harvard, he's immersed himself in the power and promise of artificial intelligence through projects on deep reinforcement learning in Assistant Professor Heng Yang's Computational Robotics Lab; particle filter machine learning algorithms with the Fiete Lab at MIT; and autonomous agent detection with Professor Sam Gershman's Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Lab.
Outside the lab, Muppidi is equally passionate about AI policy and ethics. Ensuring technologies are developed safely is a cornerstone of Muppidi's research, which he plans to continue while pursuing master's coursework in computer science and public policy at Oxford.
Muppidi served as president of Harvard Dharma and as president of the Harvard Computational Neuroscience Undergraduate Society. He includes among his mentors Sanskrit instructor Nell Shapiro Hawley, now at Vassar College, with whom he took two years of the ancient language of India. "How she taught had a very beautiful effect on my life, in the sense that I was able to get closer to my spiritual identity, who I am as a person, and what I believe in."
When Ayush Noori was 7, his grandmother, Munira Brooks, was diagnosed with progressive supranuclear palsy, a rare neurodegenerative disease that slowly robbed her of the ability to speak, move, or breathe. Assisting in her care and witnessing her long struggle inspired Noori to pursue science and medicine. "My mission is to give people with neurological disease more time with their loved ones," said Noori.
Noori has championed this mission for nearly a decade. Since the age of 12, working or volunteering in various labs, he has conducted research at the intersection of neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and precision medicine, seeking to develop new AI-enabled diagnostic and treatment options for patients with neurological disorders.
As an undergraduate, Noori has authored 25 peer-reviewed publications -- including seven as first author -- in scientific journals including Cell, Nature Neuroscience, Nature Machine Intelligence, Nature Aging, Alzheimer's & Dementia, and NBD, and his work has been featured at more than a dozen international conferences. He has been advised by professors including Marinka Zitnik at Harvard Medical School; George Church at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Materials; and Sudeshna Das, Alberto Serrano-Pozo, and Bradley T. Hyman in the Department of Neurology at Massachusetts General Hospital. He plans to do graduate study in clinical neurosciences at Oxford next year.
The recipient of more than a dozen fellowships at Harvard and a Roberts Family Fellow at Harvard Business School, the Goldwater Scholar and Adams House resident is also devoted to teaching and mentorship as co-founder of the Harvard Undergraduate OpenBio Laboratory and as a peer adviser at Harvard College.
"I have an immense debt of gratitude toward Harvard because I've studied and trained here since I was a teenager," he said. "The College, SEAS, MGH, and Harvard Medical School have enabled me to contribute to the global fight against neurological disease and given me hope for a healthier future, for my loved ones, and for the world."
Laura Wegner, Currier House resident and Germany Rhodes Scholarship recipient, wants to address patients' fragmented medical records and revolutionize healthcare technology to improve patient outcomes.
It's a cause driven by personal experience. While in high school, Wegner, formerly a competitive swimmer, had to undergo surgery for a knee injury. Doctors used the "wrong surgical method," Wegner said, due to not having access to her full medical history, including information about a pre-existing health condition, leaving her unable to continue swimming.
"That was a personal experience where I thought, 'Wow, parts of my patient data are stored in so many different places, and I wish they were together somehow.'"
To improve experiences for future patients, Wegner co-founded the startup Mii in 2022, a patient healthcare passport that securely stores patient data so patients can bring their medical history from doctor to doctor, around the world.
Wegner has taken Harvard courses in health economics, privacy and technology, and entrepreneurship, and has worked as a fellow with the Lemann Program on Creativity and Entrepreneurship. Eager for global perspectives, Wegner has studied digital healthcare systems in the U.S., Germany, and Australia, and she is writing her thesis on systems in Estonia and Lithuania.
Looking forward to improving her technical skills at Oxford with the hope of continuing her work in healthcare technology, Wegner says she loves both the creative and technical sides of entrepreneurship.
"It's just about having an idea and then immediately being able to build a prototype, test it out, and see where it goes. It's an amazing opportunity to bring any idea to life, and hopefully have it improve people's lives."