Five Hoyas have received the 2026 Schwarzman Scholarship, a one-year master's degree program in China for promising young leaders from around the world.

The scholars will study at Tsinghua University in Beijing this fall, where they will be immersed in Chinese culture, leadership and global affairs to better understand China's role in the world and network with fellow scholars from around the world.

The five Georgetown students will join a class of 150 Schwarzman Scholars selected from 40 countries and 83 global universities. They include two students from the School of Foreign Service, two from Georgetown University in Qatar (GU-Q) and one student from the McCourt School of Public Policy.

Meet Georgetown's latest class of Schwarzman Scholars.

A New Perspective on China Reporting

Evie Steele's (SFS'26)

Evie Steele's (SFS'26) interest in China began when she was 11 years old. She relished a good challenge and enrolled in her school's Chinese language courses.

Since high school, Steele has also devoted her time to journalism. In the last few years, she's interned with CNN, Voice of America and NBC News. At Georgetown, she worked her way up to editor-in-chief of The Hoya, the university's largest student-run newspaper.

In journalism, Steele has been guided by her commitment to finding truth, she said.

"From Georgetown's campus to the NBC and CNN studios, I've seen diligent, curious journalists make an impact on the communities and people they serve," she said. "They inspire me to never shirk difficult stories, stop pushing for honesty or let fear interfere with finding the truth."

Over time, Steele has melded her passion for journalism with her interest in China. In her coursework for the regional studies major in the School of Foreign Service, for example, she's seen a gap in reporting on China, wherein the media often focuses on business and policy and nudges Americans to view China as a rival, she said. As an aspiring foreign correspondent, Steele wants to show that there's more to China than geopolitics.

"My courses at Georgetown have taught me to go beyond the buzzwords and see Chinese history, politics and culture with more subtlety and nuance," Steele said. "I hope to take those lessons into journalism to give American audiences a greater understanding of China and challenge us to look beyond geopolitical tension."

As a Schwarzman Scholar, Steele is eager to build her network with the Chinese community and other scholars interested in China's role in the world.

"The Schwarzman Scholarship brings access to world-class Tsinghua faculty, incredible networks of business, media and policy leaders and unique and valuable stories of China so underdiscussed in Western media," she said. "I can't wait for my year in Beijing and to get closer to the mission of giving Americans more truth and understanding about China."

Learning From Chinese Development and Poverty Alleviation

For Natalie Delille (G'26), education has always been a vehicle toward change. Shaped by her family's roots in Haiti, Delille has focused her academic and professional pursuits on expanding access for underserved communities.

Natalie Delille (G'26)

She is the founder of DearSociety, a nonprofit that advances educational opportunity in Haiti through scholarships and educational initiatives aimed at breaking cycles of poverty. To date, the organization has provided 150 scholarships to underserved youth and communities there.

Delille's academic path reflects a multidisciplinary approach to development. She earned a bachelor's in business administration from Howard University, building a foundation in strategy, followed by a master's in AI ethics and society from the University of Cambridge, where she examined how technology can be leveraged to advance equity.

Now, as a National Urban Fellowcompleting her master's in policy management at the McCourt School of Public Policy, she is developing the skills to navigate governance, systems change and large-scale implementation.

As a Schwarzman Scholar, Delille hopes to gain a global perspective on development, tying together her experiences across business, technology and policy.

"Schwarzman's emphasis on China and global affairs offers a lens I have not yet had the opportunity to develop," she says.

Delille is particularly interested in exploring how China lifted more than 800 million people out of extreme poverty in the past 40 years. She aims to study education-driven and community-level strategies to help inform her nonprofit's mission of expanding educational opportunity as a pathway to upward mobility.

"Schwarzman's unique positioning provides direct access to the architects of China's educational and economic policies, alongside a cohort representing diverse development challenges globally," Delille said. "I want to learn directly from scholars at Tsinghua and other Chinese universities who study rural education and poverty alleviation."

Developing a Global Perspective Grounded in Values

Kingwell Ma (SFS'26)

Before coming to GU-Q, Kingwell Ma (SFS'26) spent a gap year in China. His time abroad exposed him to issues in international development in not only Asia, but around the world.

"That experience sharpened my awareness that many contemporary development challenges are less about intention than about institutional design, constraints and trade-offs," he said. "I was captivated."

He took his experiences and newfound interest to Georgetown, where Ma majored in international politics and minored in government and theology and religious studies. His academic work, presented at several conferences, focused on global development questions and Africa.

"Africa concentrates many of the world's most difficult development questions," Ma said. "Not as a single story, but as a way to see how global finance, institutions and political constraints interact under real-world conditions."

Through Georgetown's global academic programs, Ma has lived and studied in Washington, DC, Doha, Qatar, and Jakarta, Indonesia. He also participated twice in the program Zones of Conflict, Zones of Peace, which combines classroom learning with field-based study and dialogue.

"These experiences broadened my geographic perspective and encouraged me to approach conflict, cooperation, and institutional choice through comparative and structural lenses," he said.

This perspective led Ma to join the Qatari delegation to the 2025 Qatar-Africa Business Forum, held on the sidelines of the G20. By participating in high-level discussions on investment and development, he gained firsthand insight into how policy translates into practice.

At Tsinghua University, Ma hopes to deepen his comparative work while remaining grounded in Georgetown's values.

"The world is complex," he said. "And Georgetown taught me that intellectual humility and public responsibility are inseparable - knowledge only matters when it serves the common good."

Navigating Identity, Technology and Global Leadership

Born in China and growing up in Singapore, Xialong (James) Wang (G'26) witnessed both the promise and danger of digital control, including issues surrounding privacy and data collection.

His experiences led him to develop questions about how technology affects democratic norms and human dignity that he has continuously tackled throughout his education. After graduating from the University of Toronto, Wang began his master's in foreign service at Georgetown, concentrating in science, technology and international affairs.

Xialong (James) Wang (G'26)

Wang's experience with the complexities of digital governance in Singapore, Canada and the U.S. has motivated him to take an active leadership role in an increasingly digitizing world, he said.

"My vision of leadership is coalition-building," he said. "I want to help create international frameworks that protect digital rights while fostering innovation. It will demand patience, diplomacy, deep technical fluency and unwavering ethical commitment."

At Georgetown, Wang deepened his understanding of international digital development both inside and outside the classroom, serving as an associate editor for the Georgetown Journal of Asian Affairs, a policy columnist at Science Politicsand a staff editor for the Georgetown AI Association.

As a Schwarzman Scholar, he looks forward to reconnecting with his birth country and learning more about China's evolving role in global affairs.

"Schwarzman offers the opportunity to reengage with China not as an outsider looking in, but as a returning participant in its global role," he said. "I hope to serve as a bridge between East and West, using law, diplomacy and policy to foster cooperation across digital, cultural and institutional boundaries."

Building Systems That Serve People

Zarrish Ahmed (SFS'26)

Zarrish Ahmed (SFS'26), an international politics major with a certificate in South Asian studies, is driven by a clear mission: ensuring that service to humanity remains at the heart of policy and politics.

"Service has been central to my journey," Ahmed said.

The GU-Q undergraduate, who grew up in a rural village outside Islamabad, Pakistan, was shaped by two public servants: her grandfather, a social activist and politician, and her mother, an educator.

"They taught me that meaningful activism requires both vision and discipline, and that consistent investment in learning can quietly transform lives."

Ahmed found an opportunity to translate her learnings to the classroom in 2022, when Pakistan's catastrophic floods struck. She wanted to understand why Pakistani communities still suffered from the same failures in 2010, when another massive wave of floods struck the country, she said.

She dedicated her capstone thesis to the topic. Based on extensive fieldwork in Swat, a district in Pakistan, Ahmed found that while disaster-response capacity had improved, policies failed to center people, weakening institutional trust. Alongside her research, she worked to expand educational access for young girls, several of whom she continues to mentor with their university applications.

Within her campus community at GU-Q, Ahmed has also strived to be a trailblazer for her peers, galvanized by a teacher's advice during her early years to make it her mission to open educational paths for others.

She designed the first independent Certificate in South Asian Studiesand worked as an undergraduate teaching assistant,while also coordinating major events as student body vice president and South Asian Society lead.

She pursued this certificate herself during a semester in Washington, DC. While there, she worked as a research analyst at Georgetown's Center for Security and Emerging Technology, studying Chinese AI and technology development, and felt inspired to explore China's role in global affairs.

At Tsinghua University, Ahmed will study development and governance in crisis contexts, with one particular success metric in mind: "Improving someone's life, even by a single inch."

Tagged

• class of 2026