Jack Riley ’24
The Lilley Fellowship Fund was established by William Lilley ’55 in 2018 and “awards fellowships to students who exemplify academic curiosity, intellectual rigor, and scholarly passion.” The inspiration for the Lilley Fellowship program came from Yale University’s Scholars of the House program that ran from 1945-1995.
The Lilley Fellowship Program offers two research opportunities available to Upper School students: the traditional Fellowship and the Advanced Independent Study. This year’s Lilley Fellows are Michelle Jiang ’24, Ishani Khanna ’25, Nayan Shankaran ’24, Alyssa Sterner ’24, and Arudra Venugopalan ’24.
Photo Courtesy of Jess Siso
The fellowship is open to all rising freshmen, sophomores, and juniors. Before becoming a Lilley Fellow, each applicant undergoes a competitive application process. Once admitted, they embark on a research project that combines their academic interests with community service, global exploration, or another discipline that they choose. The Lilley Fellows are encouraged to think critically, engage in intellectual discourse, and develop a deep sense of empathy and responsibility toward their local and global communities. Each Fellow is additionally guided by a faculty mentor who aids them in their research.
The process for becoming a Lilley Fellow is rigorous. Director of Libraries and Lilley Fellowship Coordinator Lorie Harding says that when reviewing applications, she looks for “a student that is very curious and passionate about something… a student that really wants to dive into something just for the sake of knowing more about that particular thing and not for a deliverable like a grade or a paper.”
Similarly, once students are selected, the research and delivery of the project is similarly rigorous. Noting the challenges of a detailed outside of the classroom project, Harding reflects, “I think the hardest part for students is that the Lilley Fellowship has an experiential project piece to it. Students are very well suited in understanding how to grapple with the topic and identify sources and resources, but actually having that leverage up into some sort of deliverable project is the most challenging because it requires them to be very creative.”
So far this year, two Lilley Fellows have presented their projects in Chapel. On October 10, Sterner, advised by Ms. Brinks, researched how to foster and sustain empathy within the educational system. An excerpt from her Chapel speech perfectly sums up her concept: “The more we understand the lives and perspectives of the people we are learning about and studying, the more inclined we feel to take multiple interpretations and learn with an open mind. The more we understand the lives of the people we are learning with, the better we become at listening.”
On October 26, Shankaran presented his research on anthropology using a multidisciplinary approach to study human populations. He specifically looked at human populations in Guam and Puerto Rico and combined genetics, culture, and history to develop a holistic view of the populations.
Alyssa Sterner ’24 shares that “the Lilley Fellowship challenged me to think in ways I never previously thought possible. After months of research, I finally completed my project about sustaining empathy within the educational system, and how we can strive to fix it. I am very proud of the feats I have accomplished. It’s been difficult at times to collect and analyze data, and uncover conclusions. There were moments of frustration and doubt, but they were all worth it. The satisfaction of seeing my work come together cohesively and insightfully is indescribable.”