Class: 2015

Rahul Pandita

Rahul Pandita is a journalist and an author based in New Delhi. He is currently the deputy editor of the weekly news and current affairs magazine, Open. Earlier he was the opinion and special stories editor of The Hindu, one of India’s leading English-language newspapers. He has reported extensively from various theaters of war, including Iraq and Sri Lanka. In India, Rahul is mostly known for his reportage on Maoist insurgency in central and eastern India, and on the turmoil in Kashmir in northern India. He is the author of three bestselling books: Our Moon Has Blood Clots: A Memoir of a Lost Home in Kashmir; Hello, Bastar: The Untold…

Gemma Mortensen

Gemma Mortensen is an award-winning social entrepreneur and thinker and practitioner interested in transformative, systemic change. She is Co-Founder and Vice-Chair of More In Common and a Trustee of Bite Back 2030 and The HALO Trust. She is currently working on The New Constellation, a project to help people make transformational leaps towards regenerative social, political, and economic models. Gemma was previously Chief Global Officer at Change.org, the world’s largest platform for social change, CEO of Crisis Action, an organization that won the MacArthur Award and Skoll Award for its innovative systems model, and she co-chaired the World Economic Forum’s Global Council on systems leadership. She has also worked in…

Arshi Saleem Hashmi

Arshi Saleem Hashmi specializes in religious violent conflicts, counter-violent extremism and conflict resolution with special focus on South Asia. She is currently Dean of Faculty of Contemporary Studies and Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at the National Defence University, Islamabad. Arshi has been an Academic Fellow at the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies at the University of Oxford. She has also been a South Asia Leadership Fellow for Counter Terrorism Studies at Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and Rotary International Peace Fellow. She was Kodikara Fellow at RCSS that resulted in a book titled Conflict Transformation from Ethnic Movement to Terrorist Movement. Arshi is a member…

Zeena Johar

Zeena Johar is Senior Vice President, Business Operations at Advantia Health. Previously, she was Founder and CEO of SughaVazhvu Healthcare (SVHC) and IKP Centre for Technologies in Public Health (ICTPH), which helped create a primary care delivery network through rural clinics in India. Zeena returned to India in 2007 after earning her PhD in molecular diagnostics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, and she spearheaded ICTPH’s academic alliance with University of Pennsylvania's School of Nursing. This partnership helped develop India’s first certificate program for Indian medical practitioners, empowering them to practice evidence-based protocol driven primary-care medicine. SVHC was awarded the NASSCOM Social Innovation Honor 2014, and is a part…

Shuaihua "Wallace" Cheng

Shuaihua "Wallace" Cheng is a senior economist at the UN World Food Program, responsible for rural transformation, digital economy, and food security. He has over 15 years' research and policy advisory experience with UNCTAD, International Trade Centre, German Development Institute, ICTSD, and Shanghai Municipal Development Research Center in the areas of macroeconomy, trade and investment, innovation and digital economy, international development, food security, and climate change. Wallace is also an author for the Agenda of World Economic Forum, a member of Advisory Board of Asia Society's Asia 21 Young Leaders, and Adjunct Professor at the University of International Business and Economics. Wallace holds degrees from Fudan University and the University…

Tania Bruguera

Tania Bruguera is a political performance artist who explores the relationship between art, activism, social change, and political and economic power. Born and raised in Havana, several of her exhibitions have interrogated and “re-presented” events in Cuban history. Tania explores both the promise and failings of the Cuban Revolution through performances that provoke viewers to consider political realities masked by government propaganda and mass-media interpretation. In 2011, Tania started Immigrant Movement International, a multi-part artwork that will ran through 2015. She spent a year living in a small apartment in Corona, Queens, with five undocumented immigrants and their children. Engaging both local and international communities, as well as working with…

World Fellow directs docu-series on life inside New York City's Housing Authority

Artist-activist Tania Bruguera named to Newsweek’s Creative Class of 2019

Class of 2015

A Cuban performance artist, Indian conflict reporter, Ukrainian political activist (and rock star) and 13 other game-changing global leaders have been named 2015 Yale World Fellows. This cohort brings the total number of Yale World Fellows since the program’s start in 2002 to 275 Fellows, representing 84 countries. “I am delighted to welcome this incredible group of activists, artists, policy makers and key global players to Yale,” said incoming Yale World Fellows Director Emma Sky. “The Fellowship was designed to provide people like these – working tirelessly toward large scale change – a valuable opportunity to take a step back from the intensity of their work, to learn from and…