Princeton’s Schwarzman Scholars for 2025-26 are (left to right) Diya Kraybill, Issa Mudashiru and James Zhang.
Princeton Class of 2025 members Diya Kraybill, Issa Mudashiru and James Zhang have been named Schwarzman Scholars and will attend a one-year, fully funded master’s degree program in global affairs at Tsinghua University in Beijing.
The Princeton winners are among 150 Schwarzman Scholars representing 38 countries and 105 universities, according to the scholarship announcement. “This year’s selected Scholars are keenly interested in learning about China and broadening their understanding of global affairs, which are both now more important than ever,” said Stephen A. Schwarzman, founding trustee of Schwarzman Scholars, in the announcement.
The Schwarzman Scholar Class of 2025-26 was selected from a pool of nearly 5,000 candidates worldwide. The scholars will begin their studies in August.
Kraybill, who grew up in Singapore and is from Bangladesh and the U.S., is majoring in politics and pursuing a certificate in history and the practice of diplomacy.
She has served as vice president of the Class of 2025 since her first year at Princeton. She is editor-in-chief of the Princeton Legal Journal, a Cicero Fellow in Princeton’s Program in Law and Public Policy, a residential college community living adviser and a research assistant in the Department of Politics.
Kraybill said she ultimately hopes to pursue a career in international law and plans to learn more about Chinese political and legal systems as a Schwarzman Scholar.
“The Schwarzman Scholars program uniquely suits my professional goals and will provide me with the knowledge and experience necessary to pursue a career in international law,” Kraybill said in her application essay, adding that she hopes to contribute “to advancing international legal cooperation.”
Kraybill interned at the Correctional Association of New York as an Oscar S. Straus II Fellow in Criminal Justice, and she was a judicial intern at the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York. She also was selected to represent Princeton as a Leonard D. Schaeffer Fellow in Government Service.
Kraybill was an advising fellow with the college advising program Matriculate, director of operations for Princeton Women in Economics and Policy, and a senior writer for The Daily Princetonian. She is a member of Mathey College.
Before coming to Princeton, Kraybill spent a gap year at the think tank Research for Impact Singapore. While in high school, she founded a digital literacy project to empower and educate young women at the Surovi School in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
Mudashiru, of Bethesda, Maryland, is an anthropology major pursuing minors in East Asian studies and in global health and health policy. He is co-captain of the Princeton men’s varsity soccer team and was selected as a Class of 2025 Global Health Scholar by Princeton’s Center for Health and Wellbeing.
Mudashiru spent summer 2024 conducting ethnographic field research for his senior thesis in Sierra Leone at the Sierra Leone-China Friendship Hospital and Koidu Government Hospital-Partners in Health.
In his application essay, Mudashiru said he hopes to “pursue a career in orthopedic surgery while simultaneously leading collaboration efforts between Chinese, Western and African” global health officials to strengthen health systems in Sierra Leone (where his mother’s family is from) and across Africa.
He said a year as a Schwarzman Scholar will further harness his leadership skills and provide him the opportunity to “learn firsthand about the foundations of Chinese cultural understandings of health and healthcare provision through connection with Chinese locals, experts and institutions.”
On campus, Mudashiru is a Student Athlete Wellness Leader, participates in Princeton Varsity Club’s Johnson Park Tiger Pals and Reading with the Tigers volunteer programs, and is a mentor with the Princeton University Mentorship Program. He is also a member of Rockefeller College and was a student intern with the Carl A. Fields Center for Equality and Cultural Understanding.
He was vice president of the Black Premedical Society, volunteered at Penn Medicine Princeton Health, and shadowed surgeons at Johns Hopkins University Hospital, Georgetown University Hospital, and Metro Orthopedics and Sports Therapy in Potomac, Maryland.
Zhang, from Basking Ridge, New Jersey, is majoring in computer science and pursuing minors in linguistics and in statistics and machine learning.
He is president emeritus of the Princeton Entrepreneurship Club, a student organization with which he’s been involved since his first year. His senior thesis research focuses on digitizing historical documents with large language models.
Zhang hopes to pursue a career as an AI researcher-entrepreneur and said in his application essay that his year as a Schwarzman Scholar will “enhance my ability to improve global AI safety discourse.”
On campus, Zhang has served as an assistant instructor and lead teaching assistant for the Department of Computer Science. He is an organizer for the student group Princeton AI Alignment, which focuses on AI safety, and he is also a member of New College West.
He also has experience as a machine learning research assistant at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and as a research intern with the Cooperative Institute for Modeling the Earth System, a collaboration between Princeton and the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory.
He was the founder of the nonprofit Linguage, which promoted the study of linguistics through educational activities for high school students. He is currently a team member with Innovation for Everyone, which is developing an AI critical-thinking guide for secondary school administrators.
Genrietta Churbanova, Thomas Hughes, Oluwatise Okeremi, and Eric Stinehart will receive scholarships for a one-year master’s program at Tsinghua University in Beijing.
The Schwarzman Scholarship covers the cost of graduate study and living toward a one-year master’s program at Tsinghua University in Beijing. The Princeton winners are Class of 2022 members Amina Ahmad, Justin Curl and Katherine (Katie) Dykstra, as well as Class of 2018 graduate Edric Huang and Class of 2016 graduate Nicholas Keeley.
Princeton seniors Ella Cheng and Tyler Rudolph and alumni Lucas Briger, Anastasya Lloyd-Damnjanovic and Yung Yung (Rosy) Yang have been named inaugural Schwarzman Scholars. The Schwarzman Scholarship covers the cost of graduate study and living toward a one-year master’s program in global affairs at Tsinghua University in Beijing.
Princeton seniors Jacob Cannon, Preston Lim, Samuel Maron, Emery Real Bird, Molly Reiner and Kevin Wong have been named Schwarzman Scholars. The Schwarzman Scholarship covers the cost of graduate study and living toward a one-year master’s program at Tsinghua University in Beijing.
Princeton seniors Paul Greenbaum, Esham Macauley, Amanda Morrison and Rebekah Ninan have been named Schwarzman Scholars toward master’s program studies at Tsinghua University in Beijing.
The Schwarzman Scholarship covers the cost of a one-year master’s program at Tsinghua University in Beijing. The Princeton winners are Class of 2023 members Benjamin Bograd, Kate Gross-Whitaker, Kanishkh Kanodia, Michal Kozlowski and Elisabeth Rülke.
Princeton celebrated the the students’ accomplishments at Opening Exercises on Sunday.
