Six Harvard Students Selected as Rhodes Scholars From US, Canada

Updated November 18, 2024, at 12:26 a.m.

Six members of Harvard’s Class of 2025 were selected as American and Canadian Rhodes Scholars to pursue postgraduate studies at the University of Oxford.

Five students were chosen out of 32 total American Rhodes Scholars, representing the most winners of any American university for the sixth year in a row. Stanford and the United States Military Academy had four U.S. winners each this year. The 32 were chosen from among 865 students enrolled by 243 colleges and universities, according to the American Secretary of the Rhodes Trust.

Harvard’s U.S. winners are Lena Ashooh ’25, Sofia L. Corona ’24-’25, Aneesh C. Muppidi ’25, Ayush Noori ’25, and Tommy Barone ’25. Matthew F. Anzarouth ’25 won the Rhodes Scholarship from Canada.

The five U.S. winners bring Harvard’s total number of American Rhodes Scholars to 399 since the first Americans received the award in 1904. Yale follows next, with 267 winners over the same time period.

The newly-minted recipients join Laura S. Wegner ’25, a German recipient of the Rhodes, and Shahmir Aziz ’25, a Pakistani recipient, as this year’s Rhodes recipients from Harvard. The Rhodes Trust will continue to announce awards from its remaining international constituencies in the coming weeks.

Currier House led the College in Rhodes Scholars this year, with three of the eight recipients calling the Quad House their home. Currier had previously produced only one Rhodes Scholar since 2015.

Barone, a Social Studies concentrator in Currier House and a Crimson Editorial Chair, said he plans to use his two years at Oxford for “focusing on my studies” and “doing some introspection before I get back into another fast moving world.”

“I have a really long reading list I’ve been wanting to clear for a long time,” he added.

Muppidi, a joint Computer Science and Neuroscience concentrator in Lowell House, said hearing the news of his selection was “surreal.”

“It was undoubtedly one of the greatest and most grateful academic honors I’ve ever received,” Muppidi said.

“If you told me in August/July that I would have become a Rhodes Scholar, I would have laughed in your face because I applied on a whim, because a friend told me to,” he added. “I never really thought the Rhodes Scholarship was in sight for someone like me whose main focus is very technical.”

The recipients are planning to pursue a wide variety of disciplines at Oxford in the fall.

Ashooh — whose selection marks the third straight year a Harvard student with a special concentration, a self-designed major, won the Rhodes — wrote that she is planning to study for a B.Phil in Philosophy to “work on specifically the question: ‘What does it mean to respect an animal as an individual?’”

“To study Animal Studies, I believe, is to study social injustice, and I have pursued Animal Studies from the beginning of my time at Harvard because I have believed that solutions to social injustice could only come when animal ethics is taken seriously,” Ashooh wrote.

Corona said she plans to complete programs in Economics for Development and Sustainability, Enterprise, and the Environment while at Oxford.

“I want to see how we can use public transit to create more equitable and sustainably built environments,” Corona said, though she added that she is not yet sure what she will do after finishing her postgraduate studies.

“I hope I wouldn’t have such a clear vision for the future,” she added. “I like to think that what I will do is not yet in my imagination.”

—Staff writer Cam N. Srivastava can be reached at cam.srivastava@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @camsrivastava.