Speakers
Kathryn Gundersen
Kathryn Gundersen is deeply committed to education and international exchange, and has spent past years working on projects that promote cross-cultural learning. She graduated with a degree in English and Psychology from Harvard University, where she was President of the Harvard College in Asia Program (HCAP), an academic exchange program between Harvard and nine elite universities across Asia, and a seminar teacher for the Harvard Summit for Young Leaders in China (HSYLC), a leadership conference in Beijing attended by high school students from all over China.
Additionally, Kathryn has assisted in teaching Harvard courses on the American education system and worked as an English literacy tutor for primary school students in Steenberg, Western Cape, South Africa. Currently Kathryn teaches an enterprise education curriculum in Beijing public schools with the Flourish Project, equipping students with the skills they need to create, collaborate, and innovate as global citizens in the 21st century.
Steven
Kunis
Steven Kunis is a director and producer who uses theater, opera, and performance art as tools to promote education and cultural exchange. A recent graduate in Cognitive Neuroscience from Harvard University, Steven is now a graduate student in Cognitive Anthropology at the University of Oxford, where is the Executive Director of the Oxford Revue, Oxford’s premiere comedy troupe.
Over the past several years, Steven has used theatrical training as a way to help students improve their skills in English, leadership, and public speaking, most recently at the Uniwise Bilingual School in Dongguan, China, as well as at the SUMMER IN JAPAN Institute (Oita, Japan), the Wingsharers Leadership Conference (Seoul, South Korea), and the Harvard Summit for Young Leaders in China (Beijing).
While at Harvard, Steven worked as an independent researcher studying the relationship between student mindset and academic achievement at the Laboratory for Youth Mental Health, and he organized an arts education scheme as Producer for the Lowell House Opera, the oldest opera company in New England.
Currently at Oxford, Steven is studying the effects of theater, dance, and music on group creativity, cooperation, and identity, hoping to understand how live performance in the 21st century might encourage unity in our increasingly diverse global society.
Catherine
Zhang
Catherine Zhang is a senior at Harvard College studying Psychology and Educational Studies and originally from outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She served as the President of the Harvard undergraduate student body from 2017-2018, and was elected to represent the Class of 2019 as the First Class Marshal, or Class President. She has traveled to over 20 different countries, competed nationally in public speaking, and performed twice in Carnegie Music Hall as a concert pianist. During her time at Harvard, she served as a peer advisor to first-year students, and planned several large conferences, including Harvard Model United Nations and the Harvard Project for Asian and International Relations Conference (in Hong Kong and Australia too). She received the Coca-Cola Scholar Foundation Scholarship in 2015, chosen as the Pennsylvania delegate to the United States Senate Youth Program, and served as the Distinguished Young Woman of Pennsylvania of 2015.
Catherine is passionate about education and pursuing equity and co-founded a program with her professor that allows Harvard undergraduates to explore various opportunities in education. She spent this past summer traveling around the United States learning about educational systems, and she plans to teach after graduation. In her free time, Catherine enjoys hip-hop dancing, running, reading, spending time with friends and family, and eating. She is so excited to spend time with you all, and cannot wait to see you soon!"
Yashaar
Hafizka
Yashaar Hafizka is a recent graduate of Harvard College where he studied Neuroscience and Comparative Literature. He grew up in India, Iran, the UK, and Trinidad and Tobago, and currently lives in New Jersey. He is an aspiring doctor and is currently applying to medical school.
In college, Yashaar was co-president of Student Mental Health Liaisons, a peer education group that works on campus-wide mental health initiatives with Harvard University Health Services and led SMHL in organizing the Fifth Annual Ivy League Mental Health Conference. He served as Chief of Staff of the Harvard College in Asia Program, a student organization for academic, cultural, and social change that partners with eight universities in Asia to hold a winter conference at Harvard and spring conferences at their partner universities. He has also conducted research on cancer immunotherapy at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and on zebrafish neuroscience at Harvard. Yashaar is also a teaching assistant in Harvard’s introductory chemistry and introductory neuroscience courses, has been a member of The Crimson’s business and editorial boards, has staffed for Harvard Model Congress, and has written for the Harvard Political Review. Yashaar is excited to meet AEBS students this winter!
Laura Sky
Herman
Laura Sky Herman is a senior at Harvard University pursuing a joint concentration in Theater, Dance, and Media and Sociology with a secondary in History of Art and Architecture. She grew up sunny Miami, Florida and fell in love with performing at an early age. Since, she has worked as a professional actress, dancer, singer, director, and choreographer across the United States and internationally. Favorite credits include dancing with the Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow, singing at Carnegie Hall, and performing the role of Polly Baker New London Barn Playhouse’s production of Crazy for You, for which she won the Northeast Theater Conference’s award for Best Musical. This past summer she assistant directed Pulitzer Prize nominated composer Kate Soper’s new opera and performed with the legendary dance company Alvin Ailey. Most recently, she was one of the first women invited to join the cast of the Hasty Pudding Theatricals, America’s oldest theater company, in nearly 200 years. Laura Sky is represented by Mallory Levy at DDO Artists Agency in NYC.
Outside of performing, Laura is a proud representative for Adams House on the Undergraduate Council, a member of the Harvard Art Museums student board, and works extensively with the non-profit Period, the world’s largest youth-run women’s health NGO. She is especially interested in storytelling and how narrative can be used to bring about social change.
Melia
Henderson
Melia Henderson is a senior at Harvard College studying Computer Science. Growing up in Oakland, California, she has developed a passion for technology as well as social change. She took last year off from school to found a cyber security fellowship as well as an incubator for organizations focused on the issues of reentry. She has pitched her ideas to multibillion-dollar companies and spoke at hundred-person conferences in order to change people’s perspectives. She has taught leadership and public speaking in Korea as well as Brazil. During her time at Harvard, she has been heavily involved in Harvard National Model United Nations where she was director of the multi-hundred person Social, Humanitarian and Cultural Committee (SOCHUM). She also sat on the business board as well as the administration board. Outside of Model UN, she was on the board of Politics of Race and Ethnicity and is currently on the board of Harvard Organization of Prison Education and Reform. Melia has received several awards for her academics as well as her displayed leadership including the Ronald McDonald House Charities Scholarship, the A Better Chance Excellence Award and the National Center for Women and Information Technology Award.
Melia spent this past summer working with Digital Ventures (DV), a Boston Consulting Group subsidiary, creating a new technology for lawyers to manage their finances. Post-graduation, she plans on going back to BCG. In her free time, Melia enjoys hiking, reading, trying new foods, and meeting new people. She is so looking forward to meeting and spending time with all of you!
Alyssa
Resar
Alyssa Resar is from Baltimore, Maryland. She is currently a junior at Harvard University double majoring in Government and East Asian Studies. In addition to her academics, she is involved in Harvard's Institute of Politics and the organization Circle of Women, an international development NGO. She is proficient in Mandarin Chinese and spent last year at the National Taiwan University's International Chinese Language Program in Taipei, Taiwan.
Michael
Bervell
Michael Bervell is a senior at Harvard College studying in philosophy and computer science. Michael is the founder of “Hugs for __”, an international student-run 501c3 non-profit operating in 6 countries. Because of his work, he won the 2015 National Caring Award alongside Pope Francis and Dikembe Mutombo.
Additionally, Michael is the founder of the Enchiridion Corporation, a consulting company which employs 20 Harvard students in the United States to work with international business clients. Michael is a board member of the Harvard Alumni Association, a member of the Harvard Advanced Leadership Institute, and an avid jazz drummer
Kira
Brenner
Kira Brenner is passionate about education, cross-cultural exchange, and international relations. She graduated with a degree in Neurobiology on the Mind Brain Behavior honors track from Harvard University. During her time at Harvard, Kira served two years on the Executive Board for Harvard Model Congress, an organization that runs educational conferences, both in the United States and rotating countries abroad, for high school students, and also led a year-long public speaking mentorship program in public high schools in the Greater Boston area.
Currently, Kira teaches an enterprise education curriculum in Beijing public schools with the Flourish Project, equipping students with the skills they need to create, collaborate, and innovate as global citizens in the 21st century.
Lizzy
Thomas
Lizzy Thomas aspires to be a practicing physician and an academic bioethicist. In addition to questions about the ethics of stem cell research and medicine, however, she is passionate about the power and importance of mentorship. This is a value that has been grown by her undergraduate educational experience at Harvard University, and her graduate one at Oxford University. At Harvard, she majored in stem cell biology and minored in moral and political philosophy, and was lucky to have exceptional mentors in both academic disciplines. At Oxford, she is currently studying practical ethics, and is gratified to be under the supportive tutelage of some world-leading thinkers in that area as she does research at the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics.
At Harvard, Lizzy was deeply involved in freshman advising, serving as a Peer Advising Fellow her final three years of college and as one of the student leaders of that program during the last half of college. She helped redesign the freshman orientation program as the student member on an administrative committee her junior year. She gained more mentoring experience as a citizenship tutor through the Institute of Politics, working with a Harvard janitor for two years as he prepared for his citizenship test. He became an American citizen in January, 2016.
At Oxford, Lizzy is trying to figure out the strength of her interest in practical bioethics - namely whether it is an area she would like to work in professionally as an educator and medical doctor. Part of the draw toward that path is a desire to make seemingly complicated issues accessible to students. In the meantime, Lizzy is thrilled to get to work with the students of AEBS Academy, and hopes to empower and excite them in whatever their interests are.
Wynne
Stagnaro
Wynne Stagnaro is interested both in the small details of the brain and with how to communicate the science behind them to a broad range of people. She graduated with highest honors in Neurobiology on the Mind, Brain, Behavior track from Harvard University in May 2018.
During her bachelor’s program, she was a Peer Tutor Fellow with the Bureau of Study Council, tutoring other undergraduates in a variety of STEM courses. Additionally, she spent a summer working for Breakthrough Collaborative, a non-profit dedicated to helping first-generation college students get to and through undergraduate degrees, teaching chemistry and music to 12-14 year old students. Currently, she is working as a Research Technician in the Chiappe Lab at the Champalimaud Foundation in Lisbon, Portugal, trying to figure out how sensory information is represented in the brain of the fruit fly.
Stephen
Turban
Stephen Turban is a graduate of Harvard College, a business researcher, writer, and online influencer.
As a writer and researcher, Stephen's work has appeared in the Harvard Business Review, the Economist, the Washington Post, the BBC Business Review, the Atlantic, Freakonomics Radio, NPR, and has been cited by Hillary Clinton in speeches. His article on open offices was ranked the #13 most influential publication in 2018 by # of mentions on social media. Stephen also published a book in college, “Your Relationship GPA.”
Stephen graduated from Harvard College Magna Cum Laude with highest honors and a member of Phi Beta Kappa. During his college admission process, he was accepted by Harvard, Yale, Yale-NUS, & Wharton. At Harvard, Stephen concentrated in statistics. Before applying to Harvard, Stephen was a student at Jianguo Municipal High School in Taiwan. Stephen is fluent in Mandarin, Spanish, and speaks conversational Vietnamese. He regularly hosts events in Mandarin and Vietnamese.
After graduation, Stephen worked at McKinsey & Company in Beijing and Boston. During his time at McKinsey, Stephen worked with Fortune 500 companies across San Francisco, Boston, Beijing, and Shanghai. Primarily, his work focused on using machine learning to improve sales.
Currently, Stephen is helping create a new type of university in Vietnam, Fulbright University Vietnam. In his work, he works with the President and her team to create a development team and establish a Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation.
Stephen is also an online influencer across China and Taiwan since 2016. He currently has over 200,000 followers across social media platforms, with more than 30 million combined views of his videos or videos he has appeared in. Stephen has also appeared on television in China, most recently on Hubei Television Station’s show《非正式会 谈》。
Ashri
Anurudran
Having grown up in London, Kuala Lumpur and Houston, Ashri has witnessed the prevalence of sexual violence within vastly different societies. As a senior at Harvard College concentrating in Economics with a secondary focus in Global Health and Human Rights, she plans to use this knowledge to work on sexual violence prevention. Specifically, she hopes to introduce preventative norms early enough to create a generation of powerful, confident and informed citizens with the tools to fight sexual violence.
In the past, Ashri has founded and taught two school-based educational intervention programs for 12-to-14 year-olds that aim to change norms surrounding sexual violence in India and Kenya. The programs incorporate confidence building, public speaking, female hygiene, human rights, and career building. In Kisumu, she expanded this curriculum to include self-defense, bystander intervention, hero ideals and gender equality modules. As a Cheng Fellow, Ashri hopes to further her research in this space by exploring the impacts of prevention training in changing knowledge and norms surrounding sexual violence. Next year, she plans to pursue a Masters in Public Health at Cambridge University.
Andrew
Chang
Andrew Chang studied Biology and Global Health at Harvard University and pursued a Master's in Management Sciences at Tsinghua University. He is a published scientist on chromatin biology and worked at the Broad Institute, the RIKEN Institute of Medical Sciences, and the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center.
Growing up in Taiwan, China, and then the U.S. has guided his interest in international relations and oriented his career towards global health. He has worked as the chief executive of a registered 501(c)(3) global nonprofit, a teacher in the slums of Peru, a volunteer with an LGBTQ+ center in Taiwan, and a health advocate with Partners in Health in rural Mexico. Andrew is an aspiring doctor and hopes to work with vulnerable children in the Chinese-speaking world. Andrew plans to pursue an M.D. at Harvard Medical School in the coming years. With previous teaching experience, Andrew is excited to meet with students from Taiwan and offer his advice on pursuing studies in the U.S. Andrew calls both Taipei and Los Angeles home.
Winston
Tang
Winston Tang is a graduate from National Taiwan University, a Venture Capitalist, and an entrepreneur. Winston recently finished his studies on entrepreneurship essentials at Harvard Business School.
As an entrepreneur, Winston founded the Asia Elite Business Scholars along with AEBS My Global Friends and AEBS Academy, which connects students in Asia to top education resources in the world.
Winston graduated from NTU as an accounting major and a representative of the student body. At NTU, Winston founded the NTU Harvard Student Association and participated in numerous exchange programs hosted by AIT, Eisenhower Fellowship Association, Stanford, Harvard and so on.
Currently Winston is the General Manager of Rookie Fund Taiwan, which is a student-run venture fund that discovers and invests in the best student entrepreneurs across Asia.
James
Lee
James Lee is a senior at Harvard College studying Computer Science and pursuing a language citation in Korean. He is originally from San Diego, California and enjoys relaxing at the beach or hiking challenging trails all across Southern California.
From a young age, James enjoyed playing sports and ultimately decided to pursue a Division I Football career as an offensive lineman for the Harvard Football Team, where he earned All Ivy-League honors and played in historic venues like Fenway Park. Outside of the classroom and off the field, James is heavily involved in cross-cultural educational programs at Harvard, and he most recently served on the Executive Board of the Harvard in Vietnam Program, a non-profit liberal arts education program annually hosted in Ho Chi Minh City, as the Seminar Director. He is currently actively involved in teaching as a Linear Algebra and Calculus Course Assistant in the Harvard Math Department.
After his undergraduate education, James intends to begin his career as a consultant in New York City. He is excited to explore the city and travel to many new regions in the near future!
Dina
Hassan
Dina Hassan is a Stanford University graduate and a first year masters student at the University of Tokyo in Japan researching about intellectual historical exchanges between Japan and the United States in the first half of the 20th century. Growing up just outside Atlanta, Georgia, Dina has always been interested in history, politics, and international exchange.
During her time at Stanford University, Dina participated in a number of foreign exchange programs that particularly catered to students from East Asia as well as clubs oriented towards social justice and political action such as the Stanford NAACP and Alpha Phi Omega. Starting in her junior year, her academic interests turned towards East Asia as well, culminating in her senior thesis focusing on the relationship between African Americans and Japan during the 1920s and 1930s for which she was awarded a prize for the best undergraduate thesis in the Stanford Department of History in 2015.
Her research interests led her to a life in Japan where she was lived for more than 5years, sharpening her Japanese and understanding of Japanese society. After intensively studying Japanese for a few years, Dina formerly enrolled in the University of Tokyo as a masters student in March 2020. Dina’s experiences in Japan have not been limited to the academic, however. Throughout her time in Japan, she has had the privilege of meeting with various social activists and students who are striving to change Japanese society for the better and is currently translating a paper detailing the unique aspects of discrimination against Zainichi Koreans in modern day Japan. After completing her master’s, Dina plans to return to the United States to complete her PhD.
Aside from academics and social activism, Dina has also long held an interest in theater and public speaking, appearing in a number of plays during her time at Stanford. And after graduating and moving to Japan, Dina has continued to participate in international exchange through her participation in AEBS as a guest representative of Japan. She feels lucky to have been able to travel all over East Asia and still keep in contact with friends from the region that she first met at university. She is looking forward to working with the students of AEBS Academy and cannot wait to meet them soon!
Cammie
Dopke
Hello! My name is Cammie and I am a senior at Harvard University studying Human Evolutionary Biology and Global Health and Health Policy on the premed track. I am from Southern California and captain of the Harvard Women’s Soccer team.
On campus, I am a Peer Advising Fellow in which I help first year students with the college transition. I am also the Head of the Alumni Committee for the Undergraduate Women of Harvard Athletics where I facilitate communication between undergraduate members and alumni. Additionally, I have a passion for health, medicine, and children.
I currently am the Social Chair of the Harvard’s Foundation for the International Medical Relief of Children (FIMRC) whose goal is to improve the health of children domestically and abroad through education and service. This past summer I interned for International Quality Improvement Collaborative at Boston Children’s Hospital whose mission is to reduce mortality and complications for children undergoing congenital heart surgery. I also worked at a non-profit, Fidelity House, where I taught kids in middle school how to play volleyball and soccer. I look forward to meeting you all!
