Hi everyone! I'm a rising third year student at Columbia University studying History and Political Science, with specialisations in Modern European History and International Relations. I'll be writing my Senior Thesis on the construction of the American world order in the 1990s over this coming year.
This summer, I'll be working at Araminta, a Berlin-based NGO that provides legal support for civil society actors and democratic activists in Eurasia.
Please feel free to reach out!
I'm a rising junior at Columbia University studying Linguistics, Economics, and East Asian Languages & Cultures.
I am the coordinator for an EFL program near Columbia. My current research interests revolve around how to make language education more effective and accessible, and how to utilize community resources to make the economics of free language programs feasible.
My research interests include literary histories, the linguistics of poetry, sociolinguistics, the economics of language, and how governments shape linguistic communities. Outside of academia, I spend my time reading a lot of fiction & poetry (especially in translation), playing Stardew Valley, and cooking (and eating) my heart out :) I'd love to connect with you all!
I am an undergraduate at Columbia University, currently studying Chemistry & Human Rights.
I am a rising junior at Columbia University majoring in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science.
Hello! My name is Lily, and I’m pursuing a degree in psychology with a minor in music.
My first summer research was interdisciplinary in that it included psychology, cognitive neuroscience, behavioral studies, and music. I designed an experiment about how emotional music impacts future perception and imagination. Then, I collected behavioral data to address my research question.
For my LiA, I traveled to Cape Town, South Africa with Anjelica Young, Elizabeth Wallace, and Soyu Hong to create programming for kids and child/youth care workers at SOS Children's Villages, with the support of our coordinator: Youness Robert-Tahiri. I taught poetry and developmental psychology; I co-taught visual art, music, and college/career prep workshops.
In the future, my goal is to get a PhD in clinical psychology to support the mental health of kids who survived early adversity and continue research.
I love making art, playing my violin, and reading and writing poetry. Some of my favorite books are Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke and any poetry by Langston Hughes.
Trisha Bhujle
Laidlaw Scholar Alumna & Former Laidlaw Scholars Advisory Board Member, Laidlaw Foundation
Hello! I’m Trisha, a graduate of Cornell University from Texas, USA. I majored in Environment and Sustainability with a dual focus on food systems and wildlife conservation, and minored in International Relations. My interests in combining my enduring passions for writing and wildlife conservation have driven me to explore multiple perspectives on highly-controversial issues such as trophy hunting, retaliatory animal killings, and illegal wildlife crime. Thus, during my first summer as a Laidlaw Scholar and as a member of the Morally Contested Conservation team, I wrote a literature review on the interconnectedness of climate change and human-wildlife conflicts in East and southern Africa. In June and July 2024, I furthered this research by traveling to the University of Oxford and to the Burunge Wildlife Management Area in Tanzania, and returned to Oxford and Burunge in June and July 2025 to report my results.
As an aspiring conservationist, I am passionate about making technical scientific information more accessible to the general public. I speak Marathi, Spanish, and Swahili at varying levels of fluency and plan to continue to grow my language skills to communicate conservation challenges across continents and cultures.
The Laidlaw Scholars Program was an invaluable component of my undergraduate experience. The friendships I made, as well as the research and language skills I began to develop, encouraged me to continue to ask and seek answers to complicated questions about global affairs and environmental science. If anyone has questions about the Laidlaw Program, is interested in collaborating, or just wants to say hello, please feel free to email me at trisha.bhujle@gmail.com!
Youness Robert-Tahiri
Founder, HaHaHelps & MSocSci Psychology Candidate, University of Cape Town
Hello! I’m a psychology researcher and the founder of HaHaHelps, a comedy-based psychosocial programme designed to support young people in residential care.
I am currently completing an MSocSci in Psychology at the University of Cape Town, where my dissertation examines the feasibility of HaHaHelps with adolescents in South African child and youth care centres. My broader interests include youth mental health, psychosocial intervention development, implementation, participatory approaches, and the use of humour and play to support connection, emotional expression, self-efficacy, and coping with uncertainty.
HaHaHelps grew out of my Laidlaw Leadership-in-Action project at SOS Children’s Villages in Cape Town, where I designed and facilitated an improv-comedy programme for adolescents. Since then, I have continued developing and delivering the programme with young people in residential care and am now studying how it can be refined, evaluated, and ultimately adapted for use in other communities and settings.
Before this, my Laidlaw research at the University of Toronto examined relationships between childhood adversity, aggression, and self-regulation.
I’d love to connect with other Laidlaw Scholars and alumni interested in youth mental health, social impact, intervention development, social entrepreneurship, or simply finding creative ways to turn research into something useful in the world.