Shaezmina Khan ’23, a global affairs major at Yale College and former student in the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy, was recently awarded a Rotary Global Grant Scholarship to pursue an M.Sc. in global governance and diplomacy from the University of Oxford.
For her senior capstone, Khan — who will also obtain a certificate in human rights from Yale Law School — worked for the Afghanistan War Commission and assessed U.S. diplomatic efforts to achieve political settlement in Afghanistan between 2002 and 2021. At Oxford, she hopes to focus her research on regional security dilemmas and conflict mediation in the Afghanistan-Pakistan-India region.
Khan is passionate about American foreign policy, national security, diplomacy, and peacebuilding in the Middle East and North Africa region. She served as a policy trainee at the European Commission in Brussels and as a legislative intern for U.S. Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro in Washington, D.C. At Yale, Khan served as the executive director of the Yale International Relations Association, as president of the Muslim Students Association, and was a research assistant at both the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs and Yale Law School. She was also named a Kerry Fellow in the 2021-22 academic year.
Khan was one of eight Yale seniors and recent graduates to receive fellowships for graduate study at the universities of Oxford or Cambridge in the United Kingdom.