Truman Scholarship Nominees Make Their Marks in Public Service
We are delighted to share the names of our 2023 nominees for the Truman Scholarship for Public Service. Our candidates have focused their immense energies on making the world a better place across a wide array of endeavor — ranging from making the era of “our robot overlords” more just and humane, to ensuring affordable housing, to promoting the health and well-being of transgender individuals, to building a more environmentally just world.
Stephen Alt Khoury/COS’24, Computer Science & Physics with a minor in Mathematics
Mentors: Taskin Padir, Hanumant Singh, Alberto Valdes Garcia, Denise Garcia, Ben Hescott, Leena Razzaq
Hometown: Ridgefield, CT
As we head into the next decades, robot avatar systems promise to transform the way we live, work, and play. These systems are, described very simplistically, remotely control robots, allowing people to work in complex and dangerous environments at a distance and to be present at different locations simultaneously. Stephen Alt began working in the Robotics and Intelligent Vehicles Research Laboratory (RIVeR) of Professor Taskin Padir during the fall of 2017. The advanced work Stephen does here involves three subfields of artificial intelligence or AI: deep learning, reinforcement learning, and robotics. Stephen has co-authored multiple articles about his work and has served as Northeastern’s team spokesperson and student lead in the Avatar XPRIZE $10 million international challenge, helping the team earn 3rd prize overall and become the leading U.S. entrant. This is a complex technology and one that is potentially very powerful: avatar robots could help provide care in home and hospital, aid in disaster relief, and otherwise enable the sharing of particular skills in the absence of actual humans. Applications could also, though, include tactical avatars or robot soldiers, for example. This is where Stephen hopes to be of use to his country and humanity, helping both to advance the technologies as a research scientist and mentor and to develop the fundamental frameworks that will ensure that the technologies are ethically developed and deployed. Outside of research, Stephen has been a leader in providing access to the tools, processes, and power of the computer sciences. This work has ranged from mentoring local girls in Dorchester to prepare them for further education in technical fields; to helping peers from groups underrepresented in the computer sciences organize an identity-based support and advocacy group within our Khoury College of Computer Sciences; to creating a student group that provides access to technical support for local non-profits that are otherwise unable to afford such services. Stephen hopes to earn the PhD and become a leading researcher in the field of avatar robot systems while growing the pipeline of Americans who are well-qualified to work in this area. He aims, as well, to become a leading advisor to policy makers as they begin to forge the regulatory frameworks that will govern the future of these important technologies.
Fenner Dreyfuss-Wells CSSH’24, Politics, Philosophy, and Economics with a minor in Writing
Mentors: Elizabeth Britt, Madeline Lee, Karen Sama, Kim Irmiter, Hilary Sullivan
Hometown: Shaker Heights, OH
Fenner Dreyfuss-Wells is a deeply committed community organizer, eager to tackle the affordable housing crisis in our cities. A grassroots servant leader who canvassed door-to-door in his hometown during the 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns, Fenner Dreyfuss-Wells came to Northeastern University looking to make a difference. Though talented in math and the sciences, time in the Explore Program and conducting environmental policy research during his first year led him to understand his commitment to public policy and service and become a Politics, Philosophy and Economics major. He has thrived in the major, but his interest in politics is not simply intellectual. Rather, he has taken all that he has learned in his classes and brought it to life through significant community engagements and committed public service. Within the university, he serves as the media director for our campus radio station, co-creating and carrying out a programmatic agenda that addresses the interests of his peers and is shared with them and the greater Boston community. Throughout his time at Northeastern, Fenner has also focused on building important cross-cultural conversational bridges: conducting phone-based outreach about COVID-19 to Spanish-speaking elders residing in Chelsea, an under-resourced community hit particularly hard hit early on in the pandemic; tutoring young people at 826 Boston, helping them give voice to themselves through the written word; and creating a history of the fifty years of collective joy and struggle at the Fenway Community Development Corporation (Fenway CDC) that have made and kept the Fenway one of Boston’s most vibrant neighborhoods. Fenner’s wide-ranging experience at the Fenway CDC has provided him with keen insights into how one of the nation’s most successful community development organizations works and helped him develop a wealth of skills, which he hopes to employ in the development of innovative solutions to our housing crisis. This spring, Fenner has begun a second co-op at the Boston Department of Youth Engagement and Employment, coordinating the efforts of the Mayor’s Youth Council and helping its young members design and implement projects that help to buttress and strengthen their neighborhoods.
Jasper Duval CSSH/Bouve’24, Cultural Anthropology/Health Science with a minor in Global Health
Mentors: Carie Hersh, Susan McDonald, Liza Weinstein
Hometown: Waltham, MA
Jasper Duval is deeply motivated to promote the health and well-being of transgender individuals at a moment when, as the Human Rights Campaign states, there is an “unprecedented onslaught of state legislation targeting transgender Americans.” Jasper has sought not simply to be part of a thriving and diverse community at Northeastern, but to build it, helping to make our campus and all the communities of which he is a part, places where people are seen and valued for who they are. This centering and seeing of those with marginalized identities is evident in all that he does. Working with Professor Liza Weinstein, Jasper has been part of a team that seeks to understand the effect of territorial stigma on the health and well-being of residents of a non-notified, illegal settlement in Mumbai. In this work, for which he has earned multiple PEAK Experience Awards, Jasper demonstrated a deep concern for those in the margins of the margins, ensuring that people of gender-various experience were accounted for within the research team’s field work process. Jasper’s desire to center the margins has also taken shape within his department’s student group, where he has served as a student leader, organizing events and building community. As a resident assistant and as a leader within our choral groups, it has meant raising awareness about gender diversity and strengthening the fabric of all groups he is a part of through his spirited participation and advocacy, making space for a multiplicity of voices. Extending his learning, Jasper also completed a co-op at the Research and Planning Division of the Massachusetts Department of Correction (DOC). At the DOC, Jasper proposed and carried out a research project about improving the health and well-being of transgender inmates within the state’s correctional facilities. His brief is being used to inform DOC policy at this very moment. This spring, Jasper has been working as a case manager at the Pine Street Inn, assisting clients with substance use disorders to connect them to housing and medical care. Jasper hopes to earn the MPH and MSW, with the ambition of providing direct services to transgender individuals and crafting health policy, each informed by the other.
Amara Ifeji CSSH’24, Political Science with minors in Environmental Studies and Philosophy
Mentors: Nathan Broaddus, Lustila Getty, Olivia Griset
Hometown: Bangor, ME
Arriving at Northeastern in the fall of 2020 from Bangor, Maine, Amara is already doing powerful work at the nexus of the environment, anti-racism, immigration, and economics. A first-generation American, who was born in Nigeria and came to the US when she was two years old and moved to Maine at nine years old, Amara recognized her difference — and the difference she could make — early on. Confronted with racism as a young person in Maine, the least racially diverse state in the Union, Amara set about creating a better learning environment in the Deep North not simply for herself, but also for all of her peers. Amara’s first efforts took the shape of a Multicultural Student Union (MSU), a safe space where BIPOC students could share their experiences and organize for a more inclusive school environment. The group’s efforts eventually spurred a recalcitrant superintendent and school board into action. Already a sophisticated intersectional leader, Amara was simultaneously growing interested in the ways that environmental hazards disproportionately impact people of color. Focusing particularly on the human-made water crisis in Flint, Michigan, Amara began conducting research using plants and fungi to remediate heavy metals, earning the 2019 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair Best of Category and First Place Awards in Plant Sciences, as well as the 2020 Regeneron Science Talent Search Top Scholars recognition. Amara also planned and ran an environmental STEM learning opportunity to help 20 of her peers with marginalized identities foster a passion for STEM learning and the environment. Since joining us at Northeastern as an Ujima Global Leader, Amara’s efforts to make the world a better place have continued apace, even as she has worked full-time at the Maine Environmental Education Association. In her political science studies, Amara has earned impressive marks, bringing what she has learned in the political trenches to bear in the classroom and deploying what she has learned in the classroom in the real world, moving a landmark bipartisan climate education bill, LD 1902, through the Maine legislature and into law.