Aung Khant Paing (He/Him)

Hi everyone! I'm Vivian, an undergraduate junior at Tufts University majoring in Biomedical Engineering. My interests lie in neuroscience and bridging the gap between vulnerable populations and healthcare access. I enjoy listening to music, reading, and taking walks (in the summer)! If you're interested in any of this too or would like to chat, reach out! I'm excited to get to know everyone. 

Hello there! I'm Presto, a second-year Environmental Science student at the University of Leeds. I am still immersing myself in different disciplines of Environmental Science, such as Hydrology, Ecology, Geology, Meteorology, Oceanography, etc... but my self-defined research project stemmed from my upbringing in Myanmar.  Coming from Mandalay, Myanmar, I had been exposed to political conflict driving multiple humanitarian crises, including internal and external displacement, inflation, and human rights violations. However, my interest lies in how armed conflict can quietly accelerate environmental degradation, a relationship that remains poorly quantified in Myanmar.  My research is a spatiotemporal analysis to examine the impacts on the environment in Central Myanmar between 2020 and 2024, and to explore if these changes intersect with escalations of armed conflict patterns. Outside my academic pursuits, I feel at home practising music, from songwriting, playing instruments, to singing. I try to be an inspired and creative person by travelling.  I'd love to connect with fellow Laidlaw scholars. 

Hello! My name is Lena and I'm a rising Junior at Tufts University. I am double-majoring in biology and community health and I am passionate about health equity and primary care. For my first Laidlaw summer I will be conducting qualitative research on respiratory health in a nearby Latinx community. Feel free to contact me through My LinkedIn Profile if you have similar interests or want to chat!

I am a psychology & child study and human development student at Tufts University, passionate about mental health awareness, psychology research, and clinical interventions development. As a research assistant in Dr. Kredlow's Translational Emotion and Memory (TEAM) Lab and Dr. Mueller's Pets and Well-Being (PAW) Lab, I conduct research on emotional processing, adaptive coping, and factors contributing to social anxiety and peer stress. Aside from research, I am interested in how children's media and philosophical discussions can be used for promoting children's social and emotional learning and critical thinking.

I am Sampada Wagle, a mathematics major from Tufts University, all the way from Nepal. My interests span in topology and quantum information science. However, as I have lived throughout these years, I feel a strong sense of civic responsibility of mine, no matter what I choose to study, to understand the political landscape of my country and the whole world in general. I believe that to not care about politics is a privilege--a privilege only few enjoy, thus, I envision to use my knowledge in Math to aid different ways of how youth view politics and quantize qualitative data to best represent political leanings, ideologies and other metrics.  Coming from Kathmandu, a place where political unrest and daily turmoil and riots emerged with a little to no streamlined understanding and advocacy from youth, I want to use the platform I have to freely examine and communicate policies and history from a mathematical standpoint--something I deeply adore! Outside of academic life, I enjoy reading Camus, wandering through scenic routes with a cup of coffee, and writing existential literature that reflects my ongoing attempts to understand solitude, identity, meaning and human existence. If you'd like to explore this side of me, feel free to visit my blog: Oblivion!  I love and adore many little things that wouldn't be possible to list here, but I deeply value connections and conversations where I can know about different stories, experiences and lives of people, expanding what humanity means to me, and learning something new about the world and myself every day!

Andrew Singleton has recently joined the Tufts-Laidlaw Undergraduate Research and Leadership Programme team as a Programme Administrator and is excited to continue to elevate the Laidlaw Programming for current and future scholars. He joined the programme from Venture Café, which connects and educates the entrepreneurial and innovation community in Boston through programs/spaces/events and many other cities around the world. He has a B.S. from MIT in Biology and a background in social-impact enterprises, wind-power, user-computer-interfaces, as well as computer network design. In his spare time, Andrew enjoys travel, hiking, and wildlife photography.

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!

Hello! I’m a psychology researcher and the founder of HaHaHelps, a nonprofit organisation developing and delivering 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 programme 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.