Zhengfan Pan

Zhengfan Pan (B.A. Legal Studies, ’20; MIDS, ’21) anticipates that the friendships he will make as a Schwarzman Scholar will outlive the program itself, along with the benefits of gaining rare access to Chinese business and political leaders. Zhangfan was educated in New Zealand before coming to California and is excited to learn more about China, his parents’ homeland, especially its current entrepreneurial landscape and political system. Building on interests developed as a legislative intern in the California State Senate, he hopes to explore the philosophy of property law for […]

James Tayali

James Tayali (Public Health, ’17) came to Cal from Malawi as a Mastercard Scholar and soon connected with Professor Sam Mchombo, who encouraged him to study Swahili and connect with the African student community on campus. This experience led James to doing health work in Kenya and, ultimately, to founding three social ventures in his home country: ICI Africa, a mentorship program for high school students; Deal Malawi, an e-commerce and online shopping site; and Keki Mawe Incorporated, which manufactures and distributes iron-fortified products to women and children. He has […]

Hari Srinivasan

Hari Srinivasan (Psychology/Disability Studies, ’22) maintained a 4.0 GPA at Cal while writing regular columns and articles for The Daily Californian, teaching a popular and impactful DeCal class on autism, running Team Propaganda for the makerspace Berkeley Disability Lab, serving in leadership roles in Spectrum: Autism at Cal, and, as a senior, conducting independent fully funded research on the emotion of awe as a Haas Scholar. Outside of academia, Hari has been invited to join the boards of several national advocacy organizations, and was selected to serve on the NIHs […]

Varsha Sarveshwar

Varsha Sarveshwar (’20) majored in Political Science, with minors in Public Policy and History. She is a Rhodes Scholar studying public policy at the University of Oxford. Previously, she worked as an assistant deputy cabinet secretary in the Office of California Governor Gavin Newsom. Her first year in the Governor’s Office was supported by UC Berkeley’s John Gardner Public Service Fellowship. At Berkeley, she received the 2020 Political Science Departmental Citation, the Travers Scholarship in Ethics and Politics, and the Chancellor’s Award for Public Service. During her senior year, she […]

Zeliang Cai

Zeliang Cai (Economics, ’22), an international student from China, is passionate about finance, particularly welfare foundation and venture capital investment. As an undergraduate, he helped redesign an investment portfolio at a welfare foundation in China, for which he received the 2020 Project HOPE Outstanding Contribution Award. Zeliang also served as research team captain for Cal’s Fisher Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics and was the portfolio manager of a student start-up that supports college entrepreneurs and has more than $1 million assets and 70 members from universities around the […]

Jonathan Kuo

Jonathan Kuo (Rhetoric & Molecular and Cell Biology, ’22) will spend his year in the UK at the University of Manchester. Having done undergraduate research in the history of medicine, the university’s Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine is a particular draw for him. Jonathan served as editor-in-chief of the Berkeley Scientific Journal (BSJ) and co-president of the California Health Professional Student Alliance (CaHPSA) at Berkeley.

Mrunali Manjrekar

Mrunali Manjrekar (Bioengineering/EECS, ’23) is interested in the exciting research being conducted at the intersection of applied engineering biology and computer science working, in order words, at both the benchtop and the desktop. She plans to pursue a PhD in Computational Biology and credits UC Berkeley’s amazing “landscape of opportunity” for providing the resources and opportunities to pursue her interests. She has worked in the Nielsen lab, seeking genetic markers to explain how a particular kind of frog is able to live at high altitudes in the Andes and is […]

Anjali Kantharuban

Anjali Kantharuban (Computer Science and Linguistics, ’22) will pursue her interest in natural language processing (NLP) and language revitalization at Cambridge by conducting research in Dr. Anna Korhonen’s Language Technology Laboratory. Dr. Korhonen is a key player in the small community of scholars working in the emerging field of natural language processing for low-resource linguistic dialects, so Anjali is honored to be pursuing her M.Phil in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics under her mentorship.

Ransom Miller

Ransom Miller (Global Studies, ’24) is headed to Tainan, Taiwan to study Mandarin. A sophomore, Ransom fit two years of Chinese into his freshman year at Cal and the following summer, qualifying him to apply for this particular CLS program. He plans to become a foreign service officer in the U.S. State Department and use his language skills throughout his career.

Kristie Moore

Kristie Moore (Global Studies, ’25) will continue her Russian studies in the CLS program in Bishkek, Kyrgystan this summer. Kristie, a freshman from Southern California, studied Russian in Moscow in 2019 through NSLI-Y, the U.S. State Department’s overseas language program for high school students, for which Kristie serves as an alumni representative. She hopes to study East European Studies/Russian in graduate school and possibly pursue a stateside career in the State Department.