New Fellows

Joining the editorial staff this fall as the 2019-2020 Berta Greenwald Ledecky Undergraduate Fellows are seniors Julie Chung and Drew Pendergrass. They will contribute in print and online throughout the academic year, taking turns writing the “Undergraduate” column, beginning with the November-December issue, and reporting on other aspects of student and University life, among other responsibilities.

Chung, a proud first-generation collegian from Los Angeles and Adams House, is a social anthropology concentrator who interns at the Harvard College Women’s Center, served as associate editorial editor for The Harvard Crimson’s editorial board, and writes personal essays and short fiction as well. She spent the summer in Honolulu, at the University of Hawai‘i medical school’s Department of Native Hawaiian Health, where she investigated the relationship between traditional Polynesian canoe voyaging and health while conducting senior-thesis research on making scientific knowledge more accountable to people.

Pendergrass, of Huntsville, Alabama, and Pforzheimer House, is a joint physics and mathematics concentrator with a secondary field in English. He has served as publisher and assistant U.S. politics editor of the Harvard Political Review and as associate editor and comp director of Fifteen Minutes, the Crimson’s weekly magazine. He does research at the Harvard Chan School, analyzing the way droughts change the global food-trade system, and has published as lead author research he did at the Harvard Paulson School on the impact of climate change on air pollution in Beijing. He spent the summer in Princeton, where he ran climate models on a massive supercomputer cluster for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The fellowships are supported by Jonathan J. Ledecky ’79, M.B.A. ’83, and named in honor of his mother. For updates on past Ledecky Fellows and links to their work, see harvardmag.com/ledecky [5].