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Kennedy Scholars 2021

New Kennedy Scholars for 2021-22

The Trustees of the Kennedy Memorial Trust are delighted to announce the selection of eight new Kennedy Scholars for the 2021-22 academic year. All will receive substantial scholarships to attend Harvard University for postgraduate study, following a competitive UK-wide selection process. The new Scholars embrace a broad range of academic and professional interests, but are united by a determination to make a positive difference to society through their academic research and future careers. In addition to the new 2021-22 Kennedy Scholars listed below, five Scholars initially selected in 2020 will commence their courses in 2021, due to disruptions relating to the coronavirus pandemic.

The Kennedy Scholarships were established as part of the UK's national memorial to US President John F. Kennedy, following his assassination in 1963. The Scholarships were envisaged as a "living memorial" which would invest in future generations and advance the ideals with which President Kennedy was closely associated: intellectual endeavour, leadership, and public service. Offered by the Kennedy Memorial Trust each year, more than 550 Kennedy Scholarships have been awarded since the programme's inception, with alumni going on to distinguished careers in a wide range of fields and professions.

Liam Devlin, 30
Special Student, Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

Liam is an archaeologist specialising in cultural heritage protection and the illicit antiquities trade. He returned to higher education as a mature student and graduated from the University of Glasgow in 2017, with a degree in Archaeology and Classical Civilisation. He went on to the University of Cambridge where he recently completed an MPhil in Archaeology with Distinction. His thesis developed an interpretative methodology for accurately understanding seemingly declining sale rates in looted Cycladic figurines. Liam has participated in numerous international archaeological digs, including in Italy, Turkey, Cyprus, Albania and Greece; where on Crete, he was a Curatorial Assistant for the British School at Athens, working in The Stratigraphical Museum of Knossos. He has also worked as an instructor on the British Museum’s Emergency Management Training Scheme in Iraq, and hopes to specialise in the protection of heritage sites in the Middle East in his future career. This will also be his academic focus as a Special Student at Harvard, where he plans to take an interdisciplinary course of study blending archaeology, cultural heritage studies, and languages. He will be based in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations.

Saul Glick, 27
Special Student, Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

After graduating from the University of Edinburgh with a degree in English Literature in 2018, Saul joined London’s Metropolitan Police Service as a Police Constable. Saul has spent most of his time with the Met as a PC in the very deprived East London boroughs of Hackney and Tower Hamlets. During this time, he has been a first responder to serious crimes such as drug dealing, armed robbery, kidnapping, and stabbing. Whilst carrying out his duties as a frontline PC, Saul has passed the exams to become a detective. At Harvard, he intends to study a mixture of disciplines relevant to urban social problems and crime, ranging from child psychology to how to reform governmental agencies. On returning from Harvard, Saul intends to re-join the Met where he hopes to be able to utilise the lessons he learns from his studies in America.

Imogen Hobby, 24
MPP, Harvard Kennedy School

Imogen is an educator with an interest in using her classroom experience to tackle educational inequality at the policy level. She graduated from Oxford in 2018 with a First in Philosophy, Politics and Economics. After university, Imogen moved to Cardiff to work as a maths teacher with Teach First and stayed on for a third year after finishing the programme. During her time in the classroom she has developed an interest in education policy, particularly around addressing the barriers children from disadvantaged backgrounds face in their school lives and beyond. Imogen is looking forward to exploring potential policy solutions to the attainment gap with a view to working on this issue when she returns to the UK. Outside the classroom, Imogen is a keen rugby player and is excited to see how the sport is growing in popularity across the pond!

Paula Kelly, 29
LLM, Harvard Law School

Growing up in Belfast in the early years after the Good Friday Agreement was signed ignited Paula’s interest in the law. After completing her English degree at the University of Cambridge, she spent several years working in the Northern Ireland Assembly and the House of Commons, advising a number of senior politicians on matters such as Brexit, the implications of welfare reform, and women’s rights. Alongside this, she also studied part-time for a Master’s degree in Social Policy at the LSE, graduating top of her cohort. She eventually decided to pursue her ambition to become a barrister and was awarded scholarships to study a law conversion, graduating with distinction.

She hopes that the Harvard LL.M will provide her with an in-depth understanding and international perspective of the areas that she wishes to practise in: criminal, public, human rights, and information and media law. She is particularly excited by the prospect of exploring debates surrounding policing reform, protection of minority rights, and electoral law in America, and to consider comparisons with Northern Ireland. The many legal clinics and student practice organisations at Harvard Law School also offer the opportunity to develop her advocacy skills.

Priscilla Mensah, 28
MPP, Harvard Kennedy School

Priscilla has recently finished four years representing the UK as the Trade for Development Policy Attachée at the United Nations and World Trade Organisation in Geneva. A native South Londoner, Priscilla graduated from the University of Cambridge in 2015 with a BA in Politics, Psychology and Sociology (First Class Honours). At Cambridge she played an active role in anti-racist and women’s rights campaigning and in spring 2015 became the first Black woman elected President of the Cambridge University Students’ Union (CUSU), leading a team focused on student mental health, cultural transformation and widening participation.

Priscilla believes in the transformative potential of progressive policy, seeing local and national politics as a necessary site for liberal reforms in education, labour markets and criminal justice. During her four years in Switzerland Priscilla maintained her focus on systemic inequalities, in particular those experienced by students of colour and low income and disabled students. Her volunteer responsibilities include seats on the advisory panels of IntoUniversity, Get In Cambridge and the Black British Voices Project.

Priscilla will specialise in urban and social policy in order to develop her expertise in urban educational programme delivery. She also intends to use her time at Harvard to understand the history of institutions serving blind and deaf-blind learners for the purposes of her forthcoming PhD on blind Black women and girls in the British education system.

Isabella Mosselmans, 27
LLM, Harvard Law School

Isabella is a human rights lawyer who has specialised in immigration and asylum law. In 2018, she co-founded Here for Good, a legal charity that exists to provide free immigration advice to in-need European nationals and their family members post-Brexit. She trained at Wesley Gryk Solicitors LLP and has been a lawyer at Safe Passage, a charity that primarily assists unaccompanied asylum-seeking children to reunite with their families in the UK. She is a Trustee for Restless Development, a youth-led international development agency.

Isabella is on the 2020 Forbes 30 under 30 list for Social Entrepreneurship in Europe. She holds a BSc in Government from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and a Graduate Diploma in Law and Masters of Law in Legal Practice from BPP Law School. She was nominated one of LSE’s top 20 inspirational women in 2015 for her role as President of the Amnesty International Society and external NGO work.

Isabella is particularly interested in the transformative power of the law. At Harvard, she plans to undertake a range of courses in Constitutional Law, International Human Rights Law and Social Change. She intends to harness the law to make our society a more compassionate, just and equitable one.

Dr Krithi Ravi, 26
MPH, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

Krithi is an academic junior doctor working in the NHS. She is interested in the mechanisms of the transgenerational transfer of health disparities during pregnancy and early childhood. She will be undertaking a Master's in Public Health at the Harvard Chan School. Krithi completed her Bachelor's in Medical Sciences (First Class Honours) and her medical degree at the University of Oxford, where she was awarded several prizes and scholarships. At university, she was involved in a number of global and local health equity initiatives, including the Oxford Refugee Health Initiative, the Oxford Global Health Group, and the Oxford Global Surgery Group. She continues to pursue these interests as a doctor, and is currently undertaking a project looking at the effect of socioeconomic status on the growth of preterm infants. Krithi hopes her time at the Harvard Chan School will enable her to integrate advocacy and research to meaningfully address health disparities.

Ella Williams, 25
Special Student, Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

Ella holds an MA in French and Arabic from St Andrews University and an MSc in Modern Middle Eastern Studies from Oxford University, where she wrote her thesis on sexual violence against women in Morocco. Following this, she moved to the Atlas Mountains to volunteer for a girls’ education charity. Her academic interests include international development, education, social change and gender equality, with a focus on North Africa. She is currently studying for a DPhil at Magdalen College, Oxford, where her research aims to explore the relationship between secondary education and girls’ empowerment through the case study of boarding houses which allow girls from remote villages in Morocco to access secondary education. She is particularly interested in exploring alternative empowerment pathways and challenging conventional discourse on girls’ empowerment. At Harvard, she plans to take courses in education policy, social change and ethnography, to bridge the gap between her previous studies and area of PhD research. She also hopes to work towards fluency in Arabic and attend the Women and Public Policy Programme at the Harvard Kennedy School.


Scholar Profiles
Judith Aldersey-Williams, 1985

I am enormously proud both of winning the Scholarship and of having attended Harvard.

Judith Aldersey-Williams, 1985

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