Sixteen Harvard Law School students have been awarded 2024 Chayes International Public Service Fellowships for work with organizations based in 11 countries. The Chayes Fellows are listed below, with their summer placements and biographical information submitted by the students.
Dania Alqarawi – Minority Rights Group International, United Kingdom
Dania is a first-year law student from Houston, Texas. She graduated in 2023 from Rice University with a B.A. in political science and a minor in politics, law, and social thought. Previously Dania has worked at the Baker Institute for public policy and at Gee and Zhang. At HLS Dania is involved with the International Law Journal and the Journal on Legislation. This summer she will be working at Minority Rights Group in London, focusing on access to ancestral land by indigenous people and environmental justice.
Rachel Anderson – AdvocAid, Sierra Leone
Rachel Anderson is a JD/MBA student at Harvard Law School and Harvard Business School. Originally hailing from Boulder, Colorado, she is currently enjoying living and studying in Cambridge. Rachel graduated with a Bachelor of Science in economics from the United States Military Academy and served for over six years as an Army Military Intelligence Officer. She loves the outdoors and spends her free time back country skiing, long distance hiking, and traveling. Rachel spent the majority of her career leading small intelligence teams to support military logistic and law enforcement missions across Europe. She is passionate about gender parity and hopes to pursue a career of service around building and sustaining equality post-graduation.
Mason Barnard – International Commission of Jurists, Belgium
Mason is a joint JD/PhD student with Princeton University’s Department of Sociology. His research, advised by Professor Kim Scheppele, focuses on how social movements carve out novel civil, political, and economic rights, and how social understandings of a right inform — and are informed by — the legal definitions of a right. At the Commission, he will work on using strategic litigation to enforce judicial transparency in EU member states.
Emmanuel Berrelleza – International Bridges to Justice, Switzerland
Emmanuel is a first-year student from Las Vegas, Nevada. He graduated with honors from Dartmouth College, where he studied government and English. Before HLS, Emmanuel worked in both the private and public sectors, domestically and abroad. He worked in education in Paris, advocacy in Washington, D.C., and banking in New York before returning to Las Vegas to become a teacher at his former high school and a Senate staffer at the state legislature. At Harvard, Emmanuel is a Winthrop House tutor, involved with the Harvard International Law Journal and Harvard Business Law Review, and an active member of La Alianza, Lambda, and First-Class. He will serve as co-president of the HLS Advocates for Education this upcoming year. Over the summer, he hopes to refine his understanding of international legal frameworks for due process in various countries. Emmanuel wishes to learn how due process is tied to the educational and financial infrastructure of sovereign countries while at International Bridges to Justice.
Sarah Boxer – European Court of Human Rights, France
Sarah is a second-year student at Harvard Law School from Memphis, Tennessee. She graduated from George Washington University in 2022 with a B.A. in international affairs, concentrating in conflict resolution and Middle East studies. During her 1L summer, she worked as a researcher at the British Institute of International and Comparative Law, where she worked on cultural heritage and UK migration issues. In her Winter Term, she undertook a winter independent clinical with the European Parliament in Brussels, Belgium. At HLS, Sarah is an advanced clinical student in the Dispute Systems Design Clinic and is involved with the Harvard Jewish Law Students Association. This summer, Sarah will work at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France, within the Jurisconsult, assisting lawyers with ongoing human rights cases and research.
Clara Chiu – United Nations International Law Commission, Switzerland
Clara is a first-year student from Palo Alto, California. She graduated from Georgetown University with a B.A. in government and an M.A. in conflict resolution with a certificate in mediation. Before law school, Clara conducted research in Cyprus through a Fulbright scholarship, investigating conflict resolution through the lens of LGBTIQ+ rights and politics. Prior to that, she was the Hillary Rodham Clinton Fellow at the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace & Security, where she co-led the Institute’s research on climate change and disaster risk reduction. At HLS, Clara’s studies and extracurricular involvements are centered around international law, as she aspires to have a career in the international legal space. This summer, she will be working at the United Nations International Law Commission in Geneva, Switzerland.
Monica Dey – Climate Whistleblowers, France
Monica is a first-year student from Nashville, Tennessee. She graduated from Stanford University with a B.A. in human biology, a minor in French, and honors from the university’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. Prior to attending HLS, she lived in Nairobi, Kenya for many years, working in business development and fundraising for various international development NGOs and start-ups. At Harvard, Monica is involved with HLS Advocates for Human Rights, the Prison Legal Assistance Project, the Harvard Human Rights Journal, and the Harvard International Law Journal. After law school, she plans to work in corporate, institutional, and philanthropic accountability. This summer, she will be working at Climate Whistleblowers, an environmental NGO dedicated to protecting whistleblowers who expose wrongdoings that worsen the climate crisis.
Yasna Haghdoost – Global Legal Action Network, Ireland and United Kingdom
Yasna is a first-year student at Harvard Law School. Previously, she was a journalist for Bloomberg News based in Beirut and Tbilisi. At HLS, Yasna is involved with the Harvard International Law Journal. She will be spending this summer with Global Legal Action Network in London and Galway, Ireland, working on corporate accountability litigation. Yasna graduated from Rice University in 2017 with B.A. degrees in political science and English.
Elena Ivanova – European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, United Kingdom
Elena is a first-year Harvard Law student from Austin, Texas. Elena graduated in 2020 from The University of Texas and studied public health and government, with a minor in business. Before law school, she worked at a government consulting firm and assisted with international development projects on climate and energy on behalf of USAID and the State Department. Elena is primarily interested in international environmental law and supporting sustainable, community-centered approaches to financing the climate transition. This summer, she will be working at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in London, with a focus on climate-related financial instruments and agreements.
Julia Kepczynska – TRIAL International, Bosnia & Herzegovina
Julia is a first-year student from Southampton, New York. She graduated from the dual bachelor’s program between Columbia University and Sciences Po Paris, where she studied human rights and international relations. Prior to law school, Julia interned at the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, and worked in the arbitration practice of an international law firm in Paris, as well as a human rights NGO. She is interested in post-conflict justice, public international law, and human rights. At HLS, she is involved with the International Law Journal, the Harvard Human Rights Journal, and HLS Advocates for Human Rights. This summer, Julia will be working at TRIAL International in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Sophia Kontos – UNIDROIT, Italy
Sophia is a first-year student from Houston, Texas. She graduated from The University of Texas at Austin with a B.A. in international relations and minors in French and government. While at UT, she worked at the local NPR music station, researched global waste trade bans in an international political economy lab, and ran communications for the student environmental center. She is particularly interested in cultural heritage protection and return. This summer she will be working at the International Institute for the Unification of Private Law (UNIDROIT), an IGO based out of Rome, on projects related to cultural heritage.
Supriya Mishra – Campaña Colombiana Contra Minas, Colombia
Supriya is a first-year student from New Jersey. Supriya graduated from the College of New Jersey with a B.A. in sociology and English literature. Before law school, she taught a memoir-writing course in a women’s maximum-security correctional facility and worked individually with people sentenced to capital punishment. Supriya’s wanderlust and love for hiking continue to take her around the world. This summer, she will be working with Campaña Colombiana Contra Minas to develop regulatory frameworks for landmine surveillance in indigenous territories across Colombia.
Lauren O’Connell – Centro de los Derechos del Migrante, Mexico
Lauren is a first-year law student from Roswell, Georgia. She graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 2018 where she studied anthropology and pre-health studies with a minor in Latino studies. Prior to law school, Lauren worked with Partners in Health in Chiapas, Mexico, at Boston Health Care for the Homeless, and then with the U.S. program of the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy. At HLS, Lauren is involved with the Prison Legal Assistance Program, HLS Urbanists, the Latin American Law Review, and the Women’s Law Association. She is interested in medical-legal partnerships, community-based lawyering, and wrap-around legal services for migrant communities. This summer she will be working in Mexico City with Centro de los Derechos del Migrante, which focuses on defending the labor and employment rights of migrant workers.
Michael Pusic – International IDEA, Tunisia
Michael is a first-year student, interning at International IDEA in Tunisia this summer. At International IDEA, he’ll support the Middle East Constitution team in facilitating peace negotiations in Libya, Sudan, and Yemen. Immediately prior to law school, he spent a year working at the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, a new federal agency mobilizing capital into low-income countries. Before that, he worked as a management consultant at McKinsey & Company. In between, he has worked in sending humanitarian aid to Ukraine, serving as a policy advisor in West Africa, and in HR on the Biden campaign. He completed his undergrad at Columbia, and his Master’s at Oxford as a Clarendon Scholar.
Meera Shoaib – Platform to Protect Whistleblowers in Africa, France
Meera is an international student from Singapore and a first-year Harvard Law student. She graduated from Yale University in 2022 with a B.A. in English literature. Before law school, she worked as a trial preparation assistant at the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office in New York. At HLS, Meera is involved in the Prison Legal Assistance Project and is broadly interested in criminal justice, international human rights law, and constitutional law. The Chayes Fellowship will take her to Paris, where she will work with PPLAAF on strategic litigation, investigative projects, and legal research to defend whistleblowers in Africa.
Ruth Teklu – Media Legal Defence Initiative, United Kingdom
Ruth is a first-year Eritrean-Ethiopian-American Harvard Law student from Portland, Oregon. She graduated from Northwestern University in 2020 with a B.A. in legal studies and international studies. Before law school, Ruth worked at the Department of Justice, Antitrust Division in Washington D.C. This summer, Ruth will be working at Media Defence Legal Initiative, an international human rights organization in London that provides legal defense to journalists, citizen journalists, and independent media. At Media Defence, Ruth will undertake comparative legal research on issues of freedom of expression along with assisting the legal team with litigation the organization has brought or is supporting.