It's our pleasure to award more than $20,000 to a dozen promising student journalists this year.

Read a bit more about each of them:

Soulet Ali
Columbia University

Soulet Qureshi Ali is an incoming Master’s Student in Global Thought at Columbia University. They received their Bachelors of Arts in Philosophy at the University of Chicago and is currently writing a collection of non-fiction essays on Islamophobia, anti-South Asian racism, and corresponding human rights violations in the East Asian context as a 2023 writing fellow for Kweli Journal. During their Master’s Studies they plan to continue this line of dual academic and journalistic inquiry to spotlight the global Othering of Islam, Muslims, and the South Asian diaspora through frameworks beyond western imperialism, the War on Terror, and the US as a global exporter of anti-Muslim and anti-South Asian sentiment by highlighting under-recognized East Asian ideologies of ethnic-national chauvinism and racial supremacies(s) that undergird the growing prevalence of Islamophobia and anti-South Asian racism in the respective regions and diasporas.

Ankit Khadgi
School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Ankit Khadgi (he/they) is a Nepali queer journalist and writer. Currently, based in Chicago, they are passionate about using their platform to highlight issues of caste, gender, sexuality, and issues of social justice.

Najifa Farhat
University of Montana

Originally from Dhaka, Bangladesh, Najifa has been an environmental journalist for over three years in her home. With three years of experience in journalism, she dedicated herself to covering major environmental issues in Bangladesh, including industrial pollution, human-wildlife conflict, water crises, climate change impacts on marginalized communities, and environmental policies. Currently, she is pursuing a master's in the Environment and Natural Resource Journalism Program at the University of Montana. Despite having no formal education in environment or science, she was deeply motivated to pursue environmental journalism due to her homeland’s vulnerability due to the impact of climate change. She is guilty of enjoying her science classes a little more than the journalism classes because it intrigues her curiosity and sharpens her efforts of simple storytelling on complex matters.

Growing up near a prominent river in Bangladesh, she developed a deep appreciation for the intricate interconnectedness between water resources, humanity, and the natural world. With her anticipated graduation in the spring of 2024, she envisions a future where she can bring to light the stories of individuals worldwide who are grappling with the far-reaching consequences of climate change, with a particular emphasis on South Asia

Chaya Tong
Emory University

Chaya Tong is a rising junior at Emory University majoring in English and biology. She is a writer and editor for her campus newspaper, The Emory Wheel, and a student researcher with The Georgia Civil Rights Cold Cases Project, investigating racially motivated murders in Georgia during the modern civil rights era. She is currently interning as a reporting fellow with The Investigative Reporting Workshop in Washington D.C.



Agnee Ghosh
UC Berkeley

Agnee Ghosh is an independent journalist reporting on the intersection of beats such as climate change, public health, and gender. Her work has appeared in leading news publications like BBC Future, National Public Radio, Undark, Logic magazine, Women’s Media Center, Ms. Magazine, Atmos, Vice, AFAR, The New Humanitarian, and others. She has written long-form features, profiles, and investigations into the various ways that the political power structures affect the most marginalized among us — the gig workers, the tiger widows, the covid widows, the ASHA workers, and several others.



Jessica Chen
Columbia

Jessica Chihning Chen is a Taiwanese multimedia journalist, activist, and researcher focused on emergent dimensions of press freedom in Asia. She is an executive producer, bilingual host, and program reporter in the international center of Mirror News. She will be attending Columbia Journalism School starting in the fall of 2023.

She has reported on refugee and immigrant workers for Apple Daily in Hong Kong and Taiwan. She filmed documentaries about exiled Tibetan in India, indigenous artists and their resistance movement for Mirror News. Her work as an international journalist on the suppression of Hong Kong's free press has recently been nominated for Taiwan's most prestigious journalism prize, the Vivian Wu Journalism Award.



Pavithra Rajesh
Northeastern

Pavithra Rajesh (she/her) is a master's student in Northeastern University's Media Innovation and Data Communication program. She recently received her Bachelor of Arts degree in Journalism, also from Northeastern. She has previously worked at The Christian Science Monitor and the Detroit Free Press, through the Dow Jones News Fund, and is currently interning at Bloomberg Industry Group for the summer. She is working toward a career in multimedia journalism, hoping to combine tools from writing to data visualizations to together tell impactful stories.



Shaanth Nanguneri
UCLA

Shaanth Kodialam Nanguneri is an incoming junior at the University of California, Los Angeles where they study Geography and Communication. They are a senior staff reporter at their campus newspaper, the Daily Bruin, previously serving as features and student life News editor. They were a reporting intern for the Orange County Register, covering Asian American communities and local news. Now, they write for the Sacramento Bee's Equity Lab, covering Asian American and Pacific Islander communities. 



Tehsin Pala
NYU

Tehsin Pala is a student in the joint Global Journalism and International Relations Program at New York University. With a passion for writing and a drive to address political turmoil and minority oppression, she has found her calling in journalism. As an intersectional feminist, she also holds a Post-graduate Diploma in Women’s and Gender Studies. Tehsin has interned with The People's Archive of Rural India, documenting the art of the 'Rathwa' tribe in remote areas of Gujarat. She has also collaborated with NGOs such as Saukhyam Reusable Pads and Zidni Ilma Charitable Trust, and worked as a freelancer for LiveWire and Smashboard. Tehsin aims to shed light on human rights violations, particularly those affecting women, through her future work.



Preety Sharma
University of Toronto

Preety Sharma is a freelance public health consultant, researcher, and writer in GTA.  Preety holds a Master of Public Health (MPH) degree from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public and a Masters in Health Management (MBA) from IIHMR University, Jaipur, India. She has more than a decade of experience working with top academic institutions, international NGOs and UN agencies in India and Canada. She also teaches global health in leading academic institutions. Preety will be pursuing Dalla Lana Fellowship in Journalism and Health Impact from Dalla Lana School of Public Health in the upcoming fall. Currently she is also volunteering with Results Canada as a Fellow and actively publishing LTEs and Op-eds in leading Canadian dailies.



Raiha Zainab
The New School

Raiha Zainab is a senior liberal arts student at The New School studying journalism, international affairs, and social innovation. Her research focuses on human trafficking in the South Asian garment industry, and she is interested in investigative international human rights journalism. In NYC, Raiha works as a typewriter poet with Ars Poetica, where she writes poems for strangers on the spot. She regularly performs at open mics and runs her own poetry community. She loves to travel and has traveled to over 14 countries across the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. She can often be found roaming the streets of random cities and writing in coffee shops. You can follow along with her adventures on Instagram @raiwanders.