Before the Laidlaw Scholarship, I saw leadership as a role reserved for certain types of people: those with formal authority, those who knew all the answers, those who never showed vulnerability, and those with a level of charisma I could only aspire to reach. I viewed these qualities as innate traits rather than a tangible set of behaviours I could actively practise myself. Over the past year and a half, the Laidlaw Scholarship has challenged that perception. Through research, leadership development, the annual conference, and my Leadership in Action project, I have come to understand leadership through the 3Cs of Change Maker Values, Character, and Capacities, and as something developed through repeated choices about how we respond to uncertainty, work with others, and use what we know.

My first research summer was my first experience working in a laboratory as a wet-lab intern. I quickly learned that research rarely follows the path planned for it. Experiments failed, protocols required troubleshooting, and sometimes the most useful response was to reconsider the question rather than repeat the same approach. I became more comfortable breaking larger problems into manageable parts, asking for help when necessary, and continuing when there was no immediate answer.

This experience strengthened capacities that I now see as essential to leadership: critical thinking, problem-solving, resilience, and the ability to work under uncertainty. My contribution over six weeks formed only a small part of a much larger project, yet discussing possible future directions with my mentor, who was a PhD student, gave me experience thinking beyond an individual experiment. I began asking what the findings could lead to, which questions remained unresolved, and how I might approach them with more time. This helped confirm my interest in pursuing research and prepared me to think more independently about the scientific questions I may encounter in graduate study.

The annual Laidlaw conference expanded this perspective. Presenting my work required me to communicate ideas outside the immediate context of the laboratory and consider why the research mattered to people who did not share my scientific background. Listening to scholars working across different disciplines also challenged me to move beyond the boundaries of my own field. People were approaching issues in health, inequality, education, sustainability, and social justice through very different forms of expertise. It made me more conscious that complex global problems cannot be understood from a single disciplinary or cultural perspective.

The Oxford Character Project gave me a framework for thinking more intentionally about the person behind those skills. I became particularly interested in integrity, humility, courage, and practical wisdom. Research had already taught me that being uncertain does not mean being incapable. The Character Project helped me recognise that acknowledging uncertainty can itself be part of responsible leadership. Integrity requires being honest about what the evidence can support. Humility requires accepting that someone else may understand a situation better than I do. Courage can mean acting when there is uncertainty, but it can also mean questioning my own assumptions or changing direction when evidence suggests that I should.

These ideas became far more concrete during my Leadership in Action experience with Socios En Salud (SES) in Peru. From May to July 2026, I supported the BEAT Post-Tuberculosis Lung Disease (PTLD) team during the pilot phase and early implementation of a study focused. I observed the participant journey from enrolment, informed consent, and questionnaires conducted at participants’ homes to functional assessments and sample collection at the polyclinic. I spoke with participants about their experience of the procedures and prepared weekly reports identifying what appeared to work well and where processes might be improved.

One experience that stayed with me was interviewing a patient living with post-tuberculosis lung disease who had previously been treated by SES for multidrug-resistant tuberculosis. The interview formed part of a pilot exploring whether patient stories could help bring greater attention to PTLD. Sitting with someone and hearing how illness had affected their life gave a very different meaning to the conditions I had previously encountered mainly through scientific literature.

I also worked alongside community health workers who had been part of SES for many years, almost since its founding thirty years ago. Their commitment taught me something that could not have been learned from a leadership seminar. They knew their communities, understood barriers that would never be visible in a dataset, and had built trust through years of showing up consistently. This experience developed my global mindset by making me more conscious of the limits of entering another community with assumptions about what help should look like. Global citizenship requires curiosity about another context, respect for local knowledge, and the humility to listen before deciding what contribution is useful.

My two summers have also helped me reconcile different aspects of the researcher I hope to become. My first summer confirmed that I am deeply interested in basic science and in understanding biological mechanisms that remain poorly elucidated. My second reminded me why those questions ultimately matter. I learned more about the history and philosophy behind organisations connected to Partners In Health and about the belief that access to healthcare should not depend on geography, wealth, or circumstance. I saw how people can suffer or die from conditions that are treatable simply because adequate care is inaccessible.

As I continue toward a career in biomedical research, I want to carry these experiences into the questions I choose to investigate and the way I conduct that work. Genuine curiosity will remain central to why I pursue research, but I also want to keep sight of the people whose lives give biomedical questions their significance. Ethical leadership in science will require intellectual honesty, responsibility in how I interpret evidence, willingness to collaborate across disciplines and cultures, and awareness of who may eventually benefit from scientific progress and who may still be excluded from it.

I began the Scholarship believing that leaders were people who possessed qualities I did not naturally have. I leave it understanding leadership as something I can continue practising. The values, character, and capacities I have developed are not qualities I expect to perfect quickly. They are habits I will need to keep choosing: remaining curious, acting with integrity, listening with humility, responding to uncertainty with resilience, and using the opportunities I receive responsibly. As an aspiring researcher and global citizen, I hope to keep asking difficult questions about disease and biology without losing sight of a much more human question: who is ultimately served by the knowledge we create?