At least seven Indian American and South Asian American students have been selected for the Schwarzman Scholars class of 2019, Schwarzman Scholars announced Thursday.
The Class of 2019 will enroll at Schwarzman College on the Tsinghua University campus in Beijing in August 2018 for their master’s degree program.
The Indian American students on the list are Alex Kamath, Arjun Kapur, Ishan Anand, Riyanka Ganguly, Shantanu Banerjee, Shefali Jain and Tanay Jaeel.
Alex Kamath, 26, is a student at Harvard Law School. He is a member of Harvard’s WTO Moot Court team that won the world championship and ICC Lex Mercatoria Moot team that was global runner-up during the 2016-2017 academic year.
Alex hopes to work as an international arbitrator and bilateral investment treaty negotiator. Prior to HLS, Alex graduated as valedictorian of Nassau Community College.
Arjun Kapur earned a bachelor’s degree in Government with a secondary in History from Harvard University in 2016. He was a Staff Writer at the Harvard Political Review, a Harvard Institute of Politics Director’s Intern at CNN’s flagship international affairs program Fareed Zakaria GPS, and a Research Assistant at Harvard’s American Secretaries of State Project.
Since 2016, Arjun has been a Research Assistant at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, where he focuses on US foreign policy and grand strategy and serves as the first Coordinator of the Center’s Applied History Project. Arjun is 23 years old.
Ishan Anand will graduate in 2018 with a degree in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Cincinnati. Ishan aspires to be a physician in the future, whose vision is to develop a platform to provide high-quality, standardized, open-source healthcare to patients across the globe.
The 23-year-old student helped create and currently serves as president of EnableUC, a non-profit, open-source, prosthetic and assistive device incubator that 3-D prints devices for local and international patients — at no cost to the patient. As a Schwarzman Scholar, Ishan hopes to leverage his experiences to foster novel healthcare collaborations between China and the US.
Riyanka Ganguly is a passionate activist for equity and justice and will serve as Student Body President for Duke University for the 2017-2018 school year. She will graduate in 2018 with a degree in Political Science and is dedicating her life to service through politics both domestically and globally.
She has worked at the intersection of global health and business at the United States Agency for International Development and hopes to continue to advance the field of international development through innovation and business-minded principles.
Shantanu Banerjee graduated from The University of Texas at Austin where he majored in Economics and Government. Most recently, Shantanu worked at the fixed-income desk of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors.
Prior to the Fed, Shantanu spent time at the Department of the Treasury, White House Council of Economic Advisers, and Department of State.
Shefali Jain received her bachelor’s degree in Economics from Princeton University in 2017. She currently works in Ulaanbaatar as an Analyst at Mongolia International Capital Corporation, one of the country’s longest-operating investment banks.
She previously worked at JP Morgan as a Corporate Derivatives Marketing Summer Analyst and as a Business Development Intern at a Singaporean startup. Through the Schwarzman Scholars program, Shefali hopes to learn how to effectively utilize technology and public-private partnerships to develop emerging economies.
Tanay Jaeel graduated from Berkeley where he majored in Business Administration. During his time there, he went deep into social impact initiatives through his coursework and extracurricular, including projects for the California State Government, rural districts in South India, and various nonprofits.
Tanay is joining the Schwarzman Scholars program to study how the tech industry and public sector can partner to create and scale technology for social good.
This year 142 Schwarzman Scholars were selected from over 4,000 applicants. The Class of 2019 is comprised of students from 39 countries and 97 universities with 41% from the United States, 20% from China, and 39% from the rest of the world.
“This class represents the growth of the Schwarzman Scholars network. It has been incredible to see the program expand to 13 new countries and 51 new universities included in the Class of 2019. Meeting these people from all over the world, who at such a young age have already started to make an impact in their respective fields, has been truly inspiring,” said founder Stephen A. Schwarzman.
The scholarship is designed to prepare its graduates to build stronger relationships between China and a rapidly changing world and to address the most pressing challenges of the 21st Century.