Seven recent Yale graduates, including six members of the Yale College Class of 2026, have been awarded fellowships from various organizations for graduate study in the United Kingdom.
They join four other 2026 Yale graduates who received Clarendon Scholarships to study at Oxford.
The fellowship winners and their awards follow:
Addie Lowenstein '26 graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa with a B.A. in East Asian Studies and English. She was awarded the Rotary Global Grant Scholarship to pursue an M.Sc. degree in Contemporary Chinese Studies at the University of Oxford. Her East Asian Studies senior thesis explored how Chinese newspaper coverage of the 2008 financial crisis evolved to reflect a more assertive vision of China's role in the world order. She will build on this work at Oxford by examining China's growing influence in global economic governance after the crisis, including its creation of new international institutions like the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. During her time at Yale, Lowenstein studied the Israel-Palestine conflict through the Peace and Dialogue Leadership Initiative (PDLI), took Mandarin classes in Taiwan as a Light Fellow, and worked in the Yale Writing Center as a writing partner. She has also served as a research assistant to Emma Zang, an associate professor of sociology in Yale's Faculty of Arts and Sciences and member of the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale, focusing on why aging societies, such as China, struggle to respond effectively to demographic decline. Outside of Yale, Lowenstein volunteered as a debate coach with the National Prison Debate League and interned for U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro. She hopes to pursue a career in U.S.-China policy.
Seung Min Baik Kang '26 was awarded the Henry Fellowship to pursue an M.Phil. degree in digital humanities at the University of Cambridge. Baik Kang is interested in how and why people move across borders. His history thesis, a narrative account of Veterans for Peace, an international nonprofit, and its attempt to deliver humanitarian aid to Central America in the 1980s, was inspired by his internship at a legal aid clinic in Eagle Pass, Texas, a border city. As a member of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy at Yale, he conducted a photo-journalistic research project tracing the maritime journeys of Senegalese and Moroccan asylum seekers to Granada and Gran Canaria. At Yale, Baik Kang also served as a First-Year Counselor at Branford College and a La Casa Peer Liaison, sang in the Yale Glee Club, and organized with the Student Farmworker Alliance. His deep interest in writing - particularly writing about and from archival materials - informs his proposed research at Cambridge. There, he hopes to explore the politics behind and the implications of the digitization of Guatemala's Historical Archive of the National Police, which houses nearly 80 million documents chronicling the national police's involvement in the country's 36-year civil war. He looks forward to pursuing a career in writing, teaching, and curation.
David Rosenbloom '26, who studied philosophy at Yale, was awarded a Henry Fellowship to pursue an M.Phil. degree in Political Thought and Intellectual History at the University of Cambridge. At Cambridge, Rosenbloom, whose work focuses on 19th- and 20th-century German philosophy and social theory, will study 20th-century debates over the nature of - and relationship between - freedom, reason, technology and progress. While at Yale, Rosenbloom served as a copy editor for BRINK Review of Books and a student reader for The Yale Review, wrote feature articles for The New Journal, was an O'Shaughnessy Global Food Fellow, conducted archival research on Herbert Marcuse and Max Horkheimer, and led orientation trips as a First-Year Outdoor Orientation Trip leader. Outside of his academic work, he enjoys creative writing, adventuring in the backcountry, and playing the guitar.
Nithya Guthikonda '26 was awarded the Paul Mellon Fellowship to pursue an M.Phil. degree in Global History of Art and Architecture at the University of Cambridge. She graduated from Yale with a B.S. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and History of Art and is interested in how visual culture informs contemporary pressures relating to the environmental and biological sciences. As a Yale Library senior exhibit curator, Guthikonda explored the visual history of the rosebud orchid (Cleistesiopsis sp.), examining how botanical illustration tracks anthropogenic change and shifting societal attitudes toward habitat destruction in the southeastern United States. Guthikonda has published work across the sciences and humanities, including in Plant Ecology, Perspectives: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Yale University Library Online Exhibitions. In 2025, she served as the Adrienne Arsht Intern in the American Wing at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and has provided species identifications for the museum collections since 2024. She has also conducted research through the National Science Foundation and Tall Timbers Research Station. At Yale, Guthikonda was a former member of the women's fencing team and served as the athletics project coordinator for the Communication and Consent Educators. At Cambridge, she plans to research the practice of natural history in the 18th- and 19th centuries, understanding the roles of botanical illustration in driving scientific, cultural, and commercial enterprises of the Americas.
Munira Elbashir '26, who graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a B.A. in Political Science and Economics with an Intensive Certificate in Human Rights, was awarded the King's-Yale Fellowship to pursue an M.Phil. degree in Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge. Her research interests include the political economy of war, contemporary conflict resolution, the gendered implications of armed conflict, and transitional justice mechanisms. At Yale, her senior thesis examined the social and economic integration trajectories of Sudanese migrants in Qatar. Through her project, Munira explored how war-induced migration intersects with liminal legality to produce distinct integration experiences, chiefly shaped by economic precarity and the imperative of securing work. At Cambridge, she will study what she calls a deeply rooted contradiction in global peacebuilding: the valorization of women's grassroots leadership and their systematic exclusion from formal political authority. She will focus on Sudanese women's leadership within informal networks of political resistance and humanitarian aid. In her summers, Munira interned at the International Crisis Group and the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights. Beyond the classroom, she served as an executive board member of the Undergraduate Human Rights Journal, the Migration Alliance, and the Urban Improvement Corps tutoring and mentoring organization. She also worked as a peer tutor for Introductory Macroeconomics and as a peer liaison for the Afro-American Cultural Center for two years.
Christian Baca '26, a recipient of the Paul Mellon Fellowship, will pursue an M.Phil. degree in Education (Knowledge, Power, and Politics) at the University of Cambridge. He graduated from Yale with a double-major in Humanities and Political Science and a certificate in Education Studies. His research focuses on how post-conflict and post-authoritarian societies can leverage education systems as tools for reconstruction, reconciliation, and political formation. He has professional experiences working with foreign policy organizations, including the Organization of American States and the Washington Office on Latin America. He has also held roles with Teaching for Change and the Hartford Public School District. During his junior year at Yale, he took a leave of absence to work at Cristosal, a human rights organization in El Salvador, where he facilitated "know your rights" and corruption detection workshops. As a recipient of a 2026 Davis Projects for Peace grant, Baca is returning to El Salvador this summer to develop a program for rural youth focused on audiovisual methods of memory reconstruction, in partnership with the Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen, a grassroots cultural institution. At Yale, he served as a lead student mentor for the Pedagogical Partners Program, a residential teaching assistant for Yale's Citizens Thinkers Writers program, and as a First-Generation, Low-Income Peer Mentor.
Ava Saylor '24 is an inaugural recipient of the Spärck AI Graduate Scholarship, a UK government-run program that provides fully funded master's study and supports the development of future leaders in artificial intelligence. Also a recipient of the Rotary Global Grant Scholarship, she will pursue an M.Sc. degree in Social Science of the Internet at the University of Oxford. Saylor graduated magna cum laude from Yale University with a B.A. in Political Science in 2024. Her senior thesis examined how parents navigate school choice amid persistent segregation in Northern Ireland and proposed strategies to strengthen integrated schooling. She also completed a certificate in Education Studies, researching the risks of "sharenting," where parents share public content of their children online, and proposing regulatory solutions grounded in labor law. As an undergraduate, Saylor served as health and accessibility director for the Yale College Council, reported and edited for the Yale Daily News, volunteered with multiple Dwight Hall education initiatives, and was head First-Year Counselor for Ezra Stiles College. Since graduating, she has worked as a paralegal at Cravath, Swaine & Moore on technology litigation and immigration matters. At Oxford, Saylor will study approaches to protecting children online, the role of international cooperation in bridging regulatory divides, and ways to incentivize corporations to align their products with the public good. She will then attend Harvard Law School as a member of the class of 2030, with the goal of translating research into effective policy across government, industry, and international organizations.
