Five Harvard College Affiliates Named Marshall Scholars

Four Harvard College seniors — Alexander G. Dyer ’24, Trey Sullivan ’24, Sarosh N. Nagar ’24, and Simar S. Bajaj ’24 — and one Harvard alum, Richard R. Allen ’22, were named Marshall Scholars on Monday.

Harvard’s total of five awardees this year — its most since 2001 — tied for this year’s top spot with Georgetown University and Yale University.

The Marshall Scholarship, established in 1953 to commemorate former U.S. Secretary of State George C. Marshall, awards American citizens with funding to study at any university in the United Kingdom.

Harvard’s Marshall Scholars are five of 51 scholars to be selected this year, per a British embassy press release, selected from a pool of 1,006 applications nationwide. The 2024 cohort is the largest in the scholarship’s history. Eleanor V. Wikstrom ’24, a Crimson Editorial chair, was one of the students selected for the scholarship but ultimately chose to decline the Marshall and accept a Rhodes Scholarship instead.

Allen graduated from Harvard with a degree in Physics and Math and is now pursuing a Ph.D. in theoretical physics at MIT. While at Harvard, Allen co-founded the Harvard Satellite Team and serves as the historian of the Harvard-MIT Mathematics Tournament — a student-run high school math competition organized jointly by Harvard and MIT students.

He calls himself a “proud student in Cabot House,” where he is now a resident tutor.

Allen plans to pursue a master’s degree at the University of Oxford in theoretical computer science. He is interested in quantum information science and wants to study “the intersection of physics and computer science.”

“In the long term, I am hopeful to have a career in quantum information that spans the gap between industry and academia,” he added.

Bajaj — a History of Science and Chemistry double concentrator in Dunster House — will study Global Health Science and Epidemiology at the University of Oxford for his first year as a Marshall Scholar.

“I want to create a world without stigma, where we don’t blame patients for their diseases and thus cause these diseases to spiral out of control,” he said.

Bajaj also credits his parents’ sacrifices as immigrants.

“My parents started off their lives in the United States — they immigrated from India. My mom started off working as a McDonald’s fry cook, my dad as a leaf raker,” he said. “So just being able to understand where my parents came from, and then take that to England, funded by the British government, get two years to study at these incredible universities — it’s a world away, in many ways, and a testament to their sacrifices.”

Nagar, who is a Chemistry and Economics double concentrator in Dunster, said he hopes to study the “economics of innovation” and regulation for new technologies. He will attend University College London for a degree in innovation, public policy, and public value and then obtain a second degree from Oxford.

“I’m really interested in thinking about, ‘How are we both going to try to speed up effective innovation and also regulate it so that it’s done in a safe and effective way?’” Nagar said.

Sullivan chaired the Institute of Politics’ Politics of Race and Ethnicity program and is a founding member and editor for a board of Indigo Magazine, a campus Black arts publication.

Sullivan said he intends to study at the University of Cambridge, where he’ll research the “different labor policies” that were put in place after the abolition of slavery in the French Caribbean through a comparative lens — an extension of his ongoing thesis research.

After finishing his Marshall Scholarship, he will attend Harvard Law School — where he has been accepted through their Junior Deferral Program — and wants to become a legal academic.

“I felt both really honored but also really lucky and happy that the committee decided to choose me for this scholarship,” Sullivan said.

—Staff writer S. Mac Healey can be reached at mac.healey@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @machealey.

—Staff writer Neil H. Shah can be reached at neil.shah@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @neilhshah15 or on Threads @kne.els.