In July our 2025-26 Kennedy Scholars joined us at Lancaster House, where they met fellow Kennedy Scholar Yvette Cooper, Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, and helped us welcome the cohort who follow them. Their spring term at Harvard and MIT had taken them from the Law School clinics to Puerto Rico, Vienna and Svalbard.
Elizabeth Green (Harvard LLM) looks back on it here.
From the Law School clinics to Svalbard: the Scholars’ spring term
Standing in the sunshine in the garden at Lancaster House to welcome the next cohort of scholars, it was surreal to think back to the start of the year, when the pavements in Cambridge, Massachusetts were several feet deep in snow. The spring term brought – along with the freezing weather –another chance to explore the incredible opportunities on offer at Harvard and MIT.
In and Out of the Classroom
Since January, we have taken classes on subjects ranging from prison law to China’s role in contemporary geopolitics, and there have been lots of opportunities to put learning into practice:
Over at the T. H. Chan School of Public Health, Dr Ian Holdroyd worked with the Health Quality and Outcomes Lab to explore how to increase the efficiency of NHS secondary care funding.
David Gayle travelled to San Juan with the Center for Public Leadership, where he met with the leaders of Puerto Rico’s major political parties and learnt more about the territory’s complex relationship with the US. At the Belfer Center, Dylan Rogers led a project at the intersection of AI and the life sciences, as well as publishing on AI sovereignty and the semiconductor supply chain. George Oyebode grappled with how to align public and private institutions to work together with communities while studying across the Kennedy School, the Business School, and MIT.
Over at the Law School, Fee Robinson represented clients in special education proceedings as part of the Education Law Clinic, and I helped draft a memo on alleged violations of international law committed in the context of an armed conflict. In between volunteering at the Housing Law Clinic and participating in a reading group led by former Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, Ben Mays travelled to Vienna as part of the Law School’s Vis Moot team.
Chris Conway presented research on Russia’s institutional adaptation during wartime at NYU’s Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia, and Robbie MacPherson hosted a panel on navigating climate misinformation as part of the Kennedy School’s climate leadership conference. After classes finished, Robbie travelled to Svalbard to join researchers from across the world in discussions on Arctic security policy as a representative of Harvard’s Arctic Initiative. Daniel Graham has also been keeping cool at MIT, where he has continued his research into quantum devices using cryogenic equipment.
Further Afield
The term also brought lots of opportunities to escape the East Coast winter and explore the rest of the US. Between us, we have visited Puerto Rico to celebrate the Super Bowl, road-tripped around Texas, and travelled around the Southwest and Midwest via Amtrak.
We also had the chance to visit DC together to take in the sights, from the Reflecting Pool (then undergoing its tropical renovation) to the British Embassy. The Shed, the Embassy’s onsite pub, was a taste of home, decorated with tube signs, Premier League flags, and four-packs of Guinness. It was brilliant to meet with Senators Elizabeth Warren and Mark Warner at the Capitol and to hear their reflections on what led them into public service. We also got to connect with former scholars at the Federal Reserve and the World Bank, now working in areas ranging from education policy to economic development to communications law. Conversation moved from the best place to get a bagel in DC to nuclear proliferation – we hope we kept up!
For all of us, this time in the US has been transformative. We are incredibly grateful to the Kennedy Memorial Trust for making it all possible, and excited to see what the new cohort of scholars get up to.
