Three Harvard Students Selected As Marshall Scholars For 2025

For these three recipients, whose disciplines include biology, education policy, and history, this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

Next year, three Harvard students who are members of the 2025 Marshall Class will travel to the United Kingdom to pursue their passions for journalism, health equity, and educational equity.

The 36 students who were awarded 2025 Marshall Scholarships—which fund two years of study at a college or university in the United Kingdom—include Ryan Doan-Nguyen, John Lin, and Laila Nasher.

Doan-Nguyen:
Ryan Doan-Nguyen has a secondary in Ethnicity, Migration, and Rights and a joint concentration in Government and History & Literature.

Doan-Nguyen ’25, from Westborough, Massachusetts, aims to connect history and journalism research, writing, and advocacy. He is passionate about elevating underrepresented voices in his work because he grew up hearing his family’s stories about escaping the Vietnam War as refugees. Oral history interviews with forty Vietnamese refugees affected by imperialism are part of his senior thesis.

Doan-Nguyen claims that because we value some voices more than others, a great deal of knowledge, creativity, and methods of thinking and approaching the world are left out. He is attempting to assist in dissecting that in his work as a result.

“It’s the chance of a lifetime, and I did not expect to receive it in the slightest,” Doan-Nguyen said after receiving the recognition.

Doan-Nguyen co-founded a Harvard chapter of the Asian American Journalists Association, serves as editor of The Harvard Crimson, and is a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Research Fellow. He was previously a member of the Harvard Vietnamese Association board and the Harvard Kennedy School’s JFK Jr. Forum Committee.

Doan-Nguyen intends to enroll at the University of Oxford, where he will spend the first year studying imperial and global history and the second year studying American history.

John Lin:
Human Developmental and Regenerative Biology; secondary in Global Health and Health Policy

Boston resident Lin ’25 is curious about the characteristics that connect various rare diseases.

Lin, who works at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard’s Greka Lab, investigates how cells use cargo receptors to identify, break down, or capture misfolded proteins. He has studied how cargo receptors control the severity of a rare kidney disease and is using what he has learned to treat other rare diseases.

Lin is interested in using science journalism to increase public access to information. The Currier House resident claimed that after witnessing his parents, who are Chinese working-class immigrants, encounter financial and linguistic obstacles when trying to obtain care, he developed a strong interest in health equity.

“Even though I was really interested in solving these diseases and at the most direct level through research, I realized through observing my family’s experiences that it’s not just discovering the science that’s important but also getting the science to the people who are impacted by it every day,” Lin said.

When Lin received the news that he was a 2025 Marshall scholar, he was swimming in the pool at the Malkin Athletic Center.

Lin is an associate magazine editor for The Crimson and co-president of the Student Advisory Committee of the Harvard Global Health Institute. Additionally, he mentors young people from Allston-Brighton for the Harvard Ed Portal.

As a Marshall Scholar, Lin intends to study biological sciences at the University of Cambridge’s Wellcome Sanger Institute for genomics research in his first year and medical anthropology at the University of Oxford in his second.

Laila Nasher:
History and Anthropology; secondary in Ethnicity, Migration, Rights.

All students should have access to education as a protected American right, according to Nasher ’25. Nasher, a first-generation college student, claimed that her drive to effect change was stoked by her experience attending public school in her impoverished Detroit neighborhood before enrolling at Harvard.

Why not us? was the question Nasher was trying to answer. “Why did my community’s residents and I never have access to these kinds of educational opportunities that ought to be the standard?”

Nasher, a history and anthropology joint concentrator with a secondary in ethnicity, migration, and rights, discovered her love for history in her first year of study when she took a course on the contemporary Middle East that “completely opened” her mind to a topic that seemed “so much bigger” than herself.

Researching the history of feminism in South Yemen before and after independence from the British and after unification with North Yemen, Nasher is a Truman Scholar and a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow.

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Nasher co-directed the Institute of Politics’ diversity and outreach program, founded the First-Generation Low-Income Task Group on campus, and was a member of the Primus board. She organized with the Michigan Education Justice Coalition and interned with Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib and the Tawakkol Karman Foundation in Istanbul off campus.

She intends to conduct a comparative analysis of how the primary and K–12 educational systems in the United States and the United Kingdom influence the experiences of students during her first year as a Marshall Scholar studying education at the University of Oxford.