Stanford University
Showing 631-640 of 1,491 Results
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Shiven Jain
Undergraduate, Anthropology
Undergraduate, Art & Art History
Undergraduate Student Worker, Contingent
Undergraduate, International Comparative and Area StudiesBioThroughout my academic journey, I have sought to reimagine education as a collective act of meaning-making rather than a transactional exchange of knowledge. At Indus International School Pune, I collaborated with the English department to redesign our pedagogical framework: students alternated as instructors, teachers assumed the role of facilitators, and classrooms became dialogic spaces for co-construction. What began as a localized experiment now informs learning models across fifteen schools—a testament to the transformative potential of student agency when institutions make space for it.
This commitment to humanized learning permeates my broader work. Through IKKIS: The Podcast, I engage with actors, historians, and critics to examine postcolonial cinema as a site of resistance and reclamation. As the founder of the International Youth Philosophy Initiative (IYPI), I convene interdisciplinary seminars with peers from 37 countries, using literature, aesthetics, and critical philosophy to counter apathy and reanimate ethical inquiry.
Research forms the cornerstone of my intellectual life. For instance, my paper, Reclaiming Sociocultural Agency: The Resurrection of India and Africa in Postcolonial Cinema (The Schola, 2024), investigates narrative reclamation in the aftermath of cultural subjugation. I similarly approach media and cultural criticism as modes of activism: as Director of Content Development at RAYS Magazine, I lead initiatives that interrogate and reframe portrayals of mental health in popular culture, overseeing bimonthly publications rooted in accessibility and literacy. My essays for Film Companion, Youth Ki Awaaz, and Flick Deposit likewise aim to navigate—and, where necessary, dismantle—the ideological scaffolding of mainstream cinema.
To me, leadership and mentorship are natural extensions of intellectual agency. As a Teaching Assistant in English Language and Literature, I have conducted over 150 seminars exploring the intersections of language, politics, and aesthetics—facilitating sessions on figures such as Patrick Chappatte, Audre Lorde, Henrik Ibsen, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Across research, pedagogy, media, and mentorship, my work is undergirded by a singular conviction: that education, if it is to remain ethical, must center not merely the transmission of knowledge, but the reclamation of voice, the recognition of alterity, and the radical possibility of collective transformation. -
Jlateh Vincent Jappah
Ph.D. Student in Health Policy, admitted Autumn 2021
Master of Arts Student in Economics, admitted Spring 2024BioJlateh Vincent Jappah is a PhD Candidate in Health Policy (Health Economics) at Stanford. His research interests intersect between methods that enhance access to the social determinants of health and the provision of appropriate and timely healthcare services, with the aim of reducing avoidable morbidity and mortality and improving overall health and well-being, especially for underserved and vulnerable populations.
Jappah contends that although health insurance and access to healthcare services are important elements in the health production function, other structural and socio-economic factors collude to either foster or erode health. As such, he has a keen interest in public policy, economics, medicine, global public health, maternal and child health, and a curiosity to understand those socio-political and institutional forces that shape health and well-being. He is also interested in machine learning and artificial intelligence in healthcare.
In addition to the United States, Jappah has lived and worked in several countries in Africa, Asia, and Europe.
He is bi-lingual (English and Russian). -
Hakeem Jefferson
Assistant Professor of Political Science
BioI am an assistant professor of political science at Stanford University where I am also a faculty affiliate with the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity and the Stanford Center for American Democracy. I received my PhD in political science from the University of Michigan and a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science and African American Studies from the University of South Carolina.
My research focuses primarily on the role identity plays in structuring political attitudes and behaviors in the U.S. I am especially interested in understanding how stigma shapes the politics of Black Americans, particularly as it relates to group members’ support for racialized punitive social policies. In other research projects, I examine the psychological and social roots of the racial divide in Americans’ reactions to officer-involved shootings and work to evaluate the meaningfulness of key political concepts, like ideological identification, among Black Americans.
My dissertation, "Policing Norms: Punishment and the Politics of Respectability Among Black Americans," was a co-winner of the 2020 Best Dissertation Award from the Political Psychology Section of the American Political Science Association. -
Saumitra Jha
Associate Professor of Political Economy at the GSB, Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute, at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research & Associate Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science and of Economics
BioSaumitra Jha is an Associate Professor of Political Economy at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, and by courtesy, of Economics and of Political Science. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Center for Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law in the Freeman-Spogli Institute for International Affairs and convenes the Stanford Conflict and Polarization Lab.
Saumitra holds a BA from Williams College, master’s degrees in economics and mathematics from the University of Cambridge, and a PhD in economics from Stanford University. Prior to joining the GSB, he was an Academy Scholar at Harvard University. He has been a Center Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, as well as of the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance and the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at Princeton University. He was voted Teacher of the Year by the students of the Stanford GSB Sloan Fellow Class of 2020. He received the Michael Wallerstein Award for best published article in Political Economy from the American Political Science Association in 2014 for his research on ethnic tolerance and his co-authored work on Heroes was awarded the 2020 Oliver Williamson Best Paper Award from the Society for Institutional and Organizational Economics.
