As part of my research, I analyzed Viveros Hermanos, or Sister Nurseries, a regional reforestation project that supports communities to create nurseries for the endangered trees native to each ecosystem. I conducted an analysis on the impact of their project on the communities that they work with to understand how environmental organizations can empower communities to accomplish their goals through environmental conservation. 

The three parts of my analysis were interviews, observation and personal experience. I traveled to different communities in the region to interview community members that were part of the Viveros Hermanos project. 

Alongside this investigation, I was a volunteer at their nature reserve, Reserva Jaguar del Carrizal, where I worked with other international volunteers to support FEBB’s projects.

FEBB purchased the land for the reserve in 2019 and it was completely deforested. In only five years, the entire ecosystem has transformed. The trees they planted now reach between 10 and 30 feet high, the insects came back, there are squirrels, birds, monkeys and butterflies of all colors that flutter around this enchanted forest. 

I like to think of the reserve as a forgiving forest, the newborn forest in the heart of the world. The heart is always the first to forgive and love again. With just a little love, care, dedication and sacrifice, the magic came back. The earth, like I, like us, began to heal. 

Working with FEBB for six weeks, I was able to observe the influence of their work on the environments and communities they worked in firsthand. My personal experience from this research was nothing short of a loving metamorphosis to be better in tune with my environment, myself and my community.  

At the reserve, everyone worked three hours a day, five days a week on projects like bioconstruction, caring for the tree nursery, planting trees, deep cleaning and brainstorming sessions for their new project: a cultural community center. Each person was also responsible for cooking the three daily meals for the group once or twice a week with a partner. 

My decision to research in Colombia was not purely academic — it was also ancestral. My father and our ancestors have indigenous roots to the Caribbean coast of Colombia, specifically to Barranquilla, the sister city to Santa Marta. So this trip was also about reuniting with my ancestral land and connecting with the culture my family lost in migration to more profitable opportunities. 

Exploring the research opportunities at Georgetown turned out to be a bigger vehicle for my long-term career goals. Throughout the whole process of this investigation, I fell in love with participatory research and decided that my goal is to be a research professor who works with communities that are organizing around environmental conservation. This project felt like the first step in this process.

This trip has forever changed the way that I experience the world. I have learned that peace is not the absence of conflict but the presence of care, love and collaboration. We heal ourselves as we heal the earth. 

Cover photo by Phil Humnicky.

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It’s not all too different from his Fridays as an undergraduate at Georgetown, when he would hand out bagged lunches in Dupont Circle with the Community of Sant’Egidio, a lay Catholic organization that has helped form Bartoli’s spiritual journey and vocational life. 

Today, Bartoli heads a homeless outreach program in New York City called “The Solidarity Project.” The program, a collaboration between the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Community of Sant’Egidio, aims to complement existing state and nonprofit systems in the city through “personal bonds that overcome the anonymity of bureaucracy,” according to Bartoli.

“We want to encourage and enable all people of goodwill to serve others they would not otherwise engage with on a daily basis,” said Bartoli. “We want to build relationships that go beyond the usual expectations of our society and, in so doing, build a better world, little by little.”

The Community of Sant’Egidio

The Community of Sant’Egidio began in 1968, when high schooler Andrea Riccardi recognized the material and spiritual needs of the underserved neighborhoods on the periphery of native Rome. With a small group of friends, Riccardi began organizing acts of charity, from free classes for underserved schoolchildren to answering material needs for food and clothing. These like-minded friends were trying to live up to the gospel message by living it out every day. 

More than half a century later, that community has grown into a global community with a presence in more than 70 countries. The community centers its actions around a spiritual life rooted in fraternal bonds and service to others.

“Our theory of change at Sant’Egidio, if you can call it that, is that personal relationships are the foundation of any sort of society,” said Bartoli. If we want to change the world then we start with ourselves and the people we meet on any given day.”

The community encourages members to maintain what they call an “ear for suffering,” which consists of listening and engaging with people who have often been pushed to the peripheries of society. 

“All of the services that we do, whether it’s free meals on the streets or visiting the elderly in nursing homes, are conceived of in response to the communities in which we live,” said Bartoli. “Sant’Egidio is present all over the world and, depending on the context in which a local community finds itself, the individuals who make up that community try to respond to needs as a brother or a sister would.”

For members of the community, maintaining an ear for suffering entails more than just listening, it requires action. 

“We try our very best to make our lives available to the people we meet, to listen to what it is they ask us to do for them and to respond seriously to the invitations that they make on our lives,” said Bartoli.

“Many of the people walking down the street in New York are crying out for help. In all major cities, many people are in need of an invitation to lead a full and good life, a life that they were meant to live, a life that they were built for, a life that brings them into contact with other people, that isn’t just centered around themselves.”

Through the building of substantive relationships with one another, the Community creates systems of spiritual and material support. Just during the preparation of this story, Richard, a friend and member of the Community, entered permanent housing for the first time in over a decade of friendship. 

Bartoli on the Hilltop

Before his work with the Community of Sant’Egidio became a full-time job, Bartoli had spent years growing, professionally and spiritually, with the community. During his time on the Hilltop, Bartoli volunteered weekly with the Washington, DC chapter of the community, serving the unhoused and those in need.  

“The community revolves around the idea that every person of faith has a call and an invitation to serve the poor freely,” said Bartoli. “I have found that this not only speaks to the heart of the gospel message but is a solid foundation for a Christian life that is worth living.”

As an undergraduate at Georgetown, Bartoli not only had an impact on the city through the Community of Sant’Egidio, but on the Hilltop through his academic pursuits and lived faith, which those close to him witnessed. Eric Wu (SFS’17) remembers meeting Bartoli as first-year roommates in Darnall Hall. 

“I wasn’t close friends with very many religious people growing up and, of the religious people that I did know, I basically never spoke with them seriously about religion,” said Wu. “Regrettably, I didn’t exhibit much curiosity about their faith traditions or how they lived out their faith day to day.”

“Then, I became freshman year roommates with Pietro and he practiced his faith in a way that was so human and so in touch with the realities of his day-to-day life, his friendships, his family and his work — for me that completely flipped on its head the concept of religion and what it meant to be religious.”

A theology major and history and Jewish civilization minor, Bartoli completed a senior honors thesis that examined the contemporary relationship between Jewish and Catholic theologies. His thesis started with Nostra aetate, an official declaration from the Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican that focuses on how Catholics should engage with, and live alongside, people of other faith traditions. 

“My senior thesis studied the Catholic Church’s actions beginning with and since Nostra aetate in light of the Orthodox Jewish document, “To Do the Will of Our Father in Heaven,” said Bartoli. “I argued that an intentional line of thinking could be found in those 50 years that demonstrated a willingness to engage in the other’s terms, signaling hope for a better future.”

After graduating in 2017, Bartoli earned his M.A. from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. His thesis, titled “Interpreting Faith and Religion: Lessons from Social Justice Catholics,” explored the lives of Catholics in the Bay Area who chose to live out their faith as a profession. 

“My interest is on the role of faith in an increasingly secularized world, particularly regarding how faith motivates people to contribute to the common good,” said Bartoli. “All throughout graduate school, it was very clear to me that Christianity and the life of a Christian disciple is a life of service to the poor. We are called to abide by a love for those on the peripheries of the society as if they are our brothers and sisters.”

Before undertaking full-time work on behalf of the Community of Sant’Egidio in 2021, Bartoli actively served with the group in various capacities for more than a decade. Whether as a mentor in the School of Peace in the Bronx or as a volunteer handing out food on the street, service has remained a constant in Bartoli’s life. 

“In a world that atomizes each person and drives us further apart, we have the option and responsibility to choose dialogue, friendship, and peace,” said Bartoli. “The world needs a revolution of tenderness, as Pope Francis likes to say, and we can only achieve this through a spiritual revolution that opens us to loving in ways we never thought possible before.”

Photography by Todd France.

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Develop Greater Silo Awareness. By now, most people are aware that the news sources they select can shape — or distort — their perspective of reality in the political sphere and beyond. Every link you click, even accidentally; every social media headline you pause to read, even briefly; every news story you comment on or interact with, even by way of negative feedback — it all sends algorithmic signals that go on to shape the information flow you’re likely to encounter in the future. 

The fact that your social media feeds may overwhelmingly center one campaign story may tell you little about its actual real-world pervasiveness — or how much your friends, family members and neighbors are encountering the same topic. Thanks to beta testing or updates, even two people reading the same story on the same website may be greeted by different headlines that elicit a different experience and reaction — and never realize that fact. In other words: Just because you haven’t encountered information doesn’t mean it hasn’t been reported, or isn’t important. It’s always worth seeking out a consciously diverse news diet — and an awareness of the fact that no matter the effort you invest, you can’t be certain that yours is complete.  

The First Draft of History Is Rougher than Ever. Information is arriving faster each year — but our own human capacity to piece disparate facts into a coherent, complete whole hasn’t changed. If you encounter a complete news story based on an incomplete and ongoing situation — especially if the headline or frame confirms your priors or comports to your preferred worldview — wait a beat. If it’s an image or video that reaches you via any source that is new to you rather than a longtime purveyor of reliable information, even a seemingly trustworthy one: Don’t trust your lying eyes. We can all consume facts piecemeal, but it generally pays to hold off on drawing conclusions.

Polls Are Snapshots – Not Predictions. Polls are a sort of scientific art — and there are limits as to what even the best of them can tell you. A good pollster will have the desire to police question wording and order for any detail that could elicit distorting data; the resources to connect with increasingly elusive blocs of the electorate; the knowledge to make some educated assumptions about the current shape of the electorate; and, frankly, just a little bit of pure luck to boot. One additional presidential campaign year caveat is that the ubiquitous national polls are far less valuable than the (far fewer) surveys of the handful of states that are likely to decide the outcome. An even bigger asterisk is that any survey, at its best, may accurately capture public sentiment — at least, the views of those individuals in any demographic category who choose to engage and offer their views — over a defined window of time, usually a few days, that represent the past tense even at the moment the results are released. A poll isn’t meant to project future outcomes — just to capture one possible assessment of current sentiment. We still have a few dozen news cycle lifetimes left to go before The Only Poll That Really Matters.

For Editorial Decision-Making, Process Matters. Methods of information-sharing have become more democratic: It can be difficult to quickly discern whether an Instagram post or digital article has emerged from one of the largest, most established professional news organizations in the world, or a lone poster publishing from their basement. The distinguishing factor is the sausage-making you can’t see — the editorial vetting and decision-making involved in unearthing, curating and producing that output — and this is where a little due diligence can provide a baseline sense of confidence, or a warning signal to steer clear. Have those responsible for making difficult decisions laid out their general standards around sourcing, conflicts of interest and other ethical and coverage questions? On those occasions when errors have occurred, have they been publicly transparent about correcting those mistakes, investigating how they occurred and taking action to prevent a recurrence of the problem? If you can’t answer those questions in the affirmative about any news source you encounter, then treat their product with extreme caution.

The People Behind the News Matter. The reliability of the news you consume depends, at its most basic level, on the judgment and expertise of the individuals who gather it in the first place. Humans are imperfect, and even the most battle-tested and well-meaning reporter can have a bad day on the beat — but, speaking as a newsroom veteran, track records do matter. In a profession where your reputation is only as solid as the stories you report, people who put their names on an article or their faces on the air have a vested interest in getting things right — and the ones who break news year after year for organizations with the highest public standards for accuracy act as a critical line of defense in the battle against misinformation and disinformation.

During the Home Stretch, Log Off. Speaking as a longtime political journalist, this advice is painful, but essential. It’s vital to stay educated and informed — and to support objective journalism (a free press isn’t free!). But a news diet is like any other kind, and can benefit from many of the same principles, such as: all things in moderation, and make sure you stop consuming well before bedtime. The human mind wasn’t designed to stay immersed in a fast-moving, high-stakes, high-emotion story like the presidential campaign 24 hours a day, seven days a week. This is true even when doing just that is your job! If it’s not, consider limiting your consumption to a few designated windows of the day — and always, always, steer clear of the comments.

Illustration by Adrià Voltà.

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Just weeks into her two-month assignment, the worst Ebola outbreak in history began to ravage the country. 

“Sierra Leone was my first time confronting what a high maternal mortality rate actually means – not on paper but in real life,” said Khoury. “There, I lost anywhere from one to two women a week. Witnessing any death is devastating, but more so when it’s from something that’s completely preventable or treatable, whether it’s hemorrhage or high blood pressure or infection. These pregnancy complications are compounded by lack of access to treatment facilities, medications and trained staff”.

A decade later, Khoury has been on six assignments with MSF, an acronym of the organization’s French name, Médecins Sans Frontières. Throughout each assignment, her dedication to solidarity alongside communities affected by war, political upheaval and catastrophe has remained constant. This year, she was elected president of the MSF USA board of directors, a position which allows her to contribute to the organization as a whole. 

“I think of service not as doing something for others but as doing it with them, in accompaniment and solidarity, informed by their values and desires,” said Khoury. 

A Foundation in Service

As a child in East Jerusalem, Khoury’s desire to pursue a life of service was kindled by both her family and her surroundings. 

“I was raised by two political activists and human rights journalists, and by my grandmother, who was a social worker in Palestine,” said Khoury. “Education was drilled into me as a tool of liberation and emancipation for communities. Tied to my family’s reverence for education was also a reverence for solidarity and service, not in the sense of charity, but in collaboration and community.”

Khoury noticed the very real needs of her community and how organizations like MSF were able to cut through political red tape to deliver much-needed help. 

“Part of the reason I pursued medicine was to work with organizations like Doctors Without Borders,” said Khoury. “I had been around them as a person from the affected community that they were serving — Doctors Without Borders has been in the Occupied Territories for decades.” 

Khoury on the Hilltop

That desire to be in service to others brought Khoury to Georgetown, where for the first time she took classes in English and became acquainted with students and faculty members from a myriad of backgrounds. 

“Georgetown was really my introduction to the United States,” said Khoury. “I worked hard to attend college in the United States because I knew I wanted to pursue a liberal arts education but with an interest in science and, ultimately, an interest in medicine.”

The shift, from classes in Arabic at a K-12 school in East Jerusalem to an English-speaking research university in Washington, DC, was a monumental one for Khoury. 

“I arrived at Georgetown as a 17-year-old student and it was completely other worldly, in terms of culture, language, and social dynamics,” said Khoury. “Those were critical years of learning to understand the different backgrounds and upbringings that brought all of my peers to Georgetown.”

“It was a difficult transition and a very transformative one — it catapulted me to some of my subsequent studies and career directions and also shaped the health worker that I am today.”

Khoury, a biology major, found solace and community in ’s lab. 

“Professor Elmendorf’s class saved me,” said Khoury. “The transition to learning in English was challenging and being in a class that was working with participatory learning, supported by teaching assistants, supported by labs, and supported by all these outside-of-the-box ways of learning was vital to my success.”

After her first class, Khoury was hooked. For Elmendorf, the memory of having Khoury in the classroom is still fresh. 

“I met Rasha back in August 2000. That’s 24 years ago and the beginning of my second year at Georgetown, and yet I recall quite clearly our first conversations,” said Elmendorf. “I knew then that she was something special — brilliant, creative and passionate. She evinced a hunger for knowing ‘why’ and ‘how’ — never settling for my first answers.”

Over the subsequent years, Khoury  took several classes from Elmendorf and eventually worked in her lab during both the academic year and over the course of several summers. 

“Professor Elmendorf’s classes helped me build confidence, networks and skills that empowered me to succeed in other science classes,” said Khoury. “And then pursue medical training — I really think that if I hadn’t been absorbed in that creative way of learning and teaching then I probably would not have been able to apply and then be accepted into medical school.”

For Elmendorf, watching Khoury’s career bloom since graduation has been a joy. 

“I watch Rasha’s career now with awe. It is astonishing to me all that she has accomplished — often under the most difficult of conditions,” said Elmendorf. “And yet, I knew that about her from the beginning. She was under tremendous pressure at Georgetown, working to balance a demanding curriculum with the stresses of her family’s struggles half a world away.” 

“I came in more than once in the morning to find that Rasha had run another multi-hour experiment overnight testing the effect of drugs on Giardia and simply catnapped in the lab between timepoints. All my admonitions to go home to sleep met with a stubborn insistence that she could do that later but she simply couldn’t wait to see the experimental results.”

For the faculty at Georgetown, Khoury’s time on the Hilltop, and her career since, have exemplified the values that define the school and community. 

“We often talk about college as a time of growth. That’s as true for professors as it is for students, and one of the great joys about teaching at Georgetown is how many of my students have helped me to grow,” said Elmendorf. “Even now, in my 26th year at Georgetown, Rasha stands out as a pivotal person in my development as a professor, scientist and human being. Her life’s work embodies our motto of cura personalis, and I still look to her to keep learning more about our world and how we each can best serve others.”

The Path to Practicing

Khoury traveled up the East Coast to New Haven, Connecticut, where she attended the Yale School of Medicine. There, she saw firsthand the need for equitable access to health care. 

“In medical school, it was jarring to see that depending on a patient’s background they get access to different levels of care within the same health system,” said Khoury. “It was the first time that I witnessed that where I was part of the system, with a patient in front of me and it became important to me to try and understand the structural reasons behind these disparities. I don’t think these disparities are innate to people, but are a systemic byproduct of the way that we have created societies.”

In medical school, Khoury worked at both the Yale Center for Asylum Medicine and the Community Service Network, which provides services to those experiencing houselessness. Khoury completed her residency training in obstetrics and gynecology at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). 

“I sought out training at UCSF because they have a strong reproductive justice framework to women’s health,” said Khoury. “My training involved learning how to think about and advocate for access to safe abortion care, safe pregnancy and birth care and safe living spaces to raise healthy children”

“I found a deeply engaged and like-minded group there and, ultimately, had the opportunity to work with people who were coming from various communities that have been disinvested in over the years. It just strengthened my desire to work in a setting that was both acknowledging these injustices and trying to do something about them.”

After completing her residency, Khoury continued her training for two years at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. There, she studied complex family planning and global women’s health. 

Doctors Without Borders

On Khoury’s first assignment with MSF, in Sierra Leone, she witnessed the harsh realities of pregnancy in volatile situations and under extenuating circumstances. In the decade since, Khoury has worked in Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq, the Ivory Coast, and Lebanon. 

“In Iraq, I was in Mosul, which was under siege by ISIS for several years,” said Khoury. “When I was working there, it was being recaptured by the Iraqi government. Watching people emerge from that siege, watching how a previously robust city with a sophisticated healthcare infrastructure was now decimated with people needing to seek care from MSF was deeply painful.” 

In Mosul, Khoury saw pregnancies that were affected by the realities of war, chemicals used in weapons, toxins leached into the soil and the sheer trauma of living through armed conflict.

“One case I remember was a 16-year-old girl who came in with excessive bleeding after birth,” said Khoury. “The local team wanted to perform a hysterectomy, which would save her life but leave her without a uterus. Because MSF was there, we had the supplies and tools to preserve her uterus and save her life. Retaining her uterus was not only meaningful to her, but meaningful to her family and her social standing. Those kinds of experiences never leave you.” 

Khoury spent more than a year in Afghanistan, where MSF was delivering more than 2,000 babies a month, a number that many U.S. hospitals approach in one year. 

“The sheer volume of that workforce was about 400 locally-hired staff: midwives, nurse anesthetists and doctors with obstetric skills,” said Khoury. “All of those people were working in service of their community, providing care with an attention to dignity. That dignity manifested not only in quality of care, but in the inclusion of family, in freedom of movement and in access to food. It’s hard to capture how special that is anywhere but especially in unstable contexts.” 

In 2019, Khoury joined the MSF USA board of directors to not only lend her expertise in a leadership capacity but amplify the voices of the patients and global staff she’d worked alongside. 

“I continue to work with MSF because when we enter into a context we are clear about providing medical care to anyone who needs it. We ensure we have adequate staffing, that staff have the expertise and compensation they need to do their job well, that they have access to the life saving supplies and medications they may need”, said Khoury. “I feel that I have been able to give the highest level of care in each of those spaces and that really stands out compared to other humanitarian organizations that may be constrained financially or logistically.”

“I don’t think it would be possible to keep working for an organization like MSF if those things weren’t true because to go and witness suffering and preventable death and to feel like you’re not prepared to act would feel unethical.”

Currently, Khoury works full time as a subspecialist in maternal fetal medicine and complex family planning at Boston Medical Center, but keeps two months of her year reserved for overseas assignments with Doctors Without Borders. At Boston Medical Center, a non-profit and safety net hospital, Khoury works with communities living in poverty and forcibly displaced migrant communities who have faced seemingly insurmountable barriers to equitable care. 

In May, Khoury was elected president of the MSF USA board of directors. 

Cover photo by Jessica Scranton.

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Professor Susanna Lee is an internationally recognized specialist in the nineteenth-century French novel and twentieth-century crime fiction. Lee, who serves as chair of the , has a variety of research interests, including popular culture, literary theory and law and humanities. 

Lee’s first book, A World Abandoned by God, examined lived experiences of the secular world in nineteenth-century French and Russian narrative. She then wrote two books on hard-boiled detective fiction, a genre that emphasizes individualism and realism. studied French and American detectives as nationally specific culture heroes and models of spiritual authority. In , a “feisty alternative view of American history as seen through the lens of hard-boiled detective fiction,” Lee tells the story of the American twentieth and early twenty-first centuries through the nation’s ever-evolving love affair with the hard-boiled detective. True to her roots in the French canon, she also edited the Norton Critical Editions of and .

Now in her second year as convener of Georgetown’s , Lee continues to research the limits and possibilities of individual human agency. Most recently, she has co-edited, with , Regulating the Body, forthcoming in 2025, which analyzes the practices and discourses used to constrain bodily autonomy in American law. She is currently at work on a new book project, a cultural history of alcoholism in France.

What is a book that everyone should read?

Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu). Yes, it is long, but you will thank me — once you have read Proust, you have a friend for life. This novel has everything — incomparably beautiful writing, complicated and obsessive and memorable characters and a deep dive into human nature of all kinds. And it is funny. You can’t beat Proust when it comes to creating and making fun of characters who try too hard. I first came to Proust in graduate school fearing it would be a daunting slog, but not at all, he is amazing. 

What is a book that you revisit every year?

������ܲ������’s Madame Bovary, because every sentence is like a celebration of what words can do. He took seven years to write it and it is just one Easter egg after another. This is one of the books that made me decide to become a 19��è�������ٱ� (to specialize in the 19th century) because of what Flaubert does with language and the way the characters are relatable and repulsive at the same time, so bold and so clueless.

What is a book that inspired your academic journey?

Both the books named above, also Woman at Point Zero by Nawal El Saadawi and Pop. 1280 by Jim Thompson. The first course I ever designed was an American literature course called “Hardboiled Crime Fiction;” we started with Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler and, while preparing that course, I discovered Jim Thompson. He looked like a patrician gentleman but the writing is some of the most unhinged material you’ll ever see, and it’s fascinating to see total moral rot combined with lively and poetic writing. Oddly enough, Pop. 1280 was made into a French movie, called Coup de Torchon, which the director chose to set in French-occupied West Africa, and there is a lot to say about that.  

What is the best new book that you’ve read in the past year?

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan. So beautiful and moving. It’s about community and empathy and quiet, important lives, how we can save each other. To me it reads delicately, like lace filigree, even though all of human life is there, and when it’s over you just sit and marvel at what you just read.

What is the perfect book for the beach?

This is a tough one because I’m from Southern California and if we’re at the beach we’re in the water! But to answer the question — anything by English mystery writer Ruth Rendell, A Judgment in Stone or The Bridesmaid are great and both were made into French movies. Also French mystery writer Fred Vargas or American mystery writer Kellye Garrett. Ruth Rendell was prolific and incredible, she also wrote psychological thrillers under the name of Barbara Vine. Fred Vargas in some ways rejuvenated French crime fiction, and she has been writing amazing novels since the 1990s — email me for recommendations! Kellye Garrett’s Hollywood Homicide was so much fun to read, and cheered me during the pandemic — her latest is Missing White Woman. 

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That’s why, every week, she took time to work with Lutheran Social Services, a refugee resettlement agency in Northern Virginia. There, both in-person and online, she co-taught classes to an all-female club of Afghan refugees, covering topics from financial literacy to feminine health and English as a second language (ESL). 

“It felt natural to join initiatives dedicated to migration and ESL because I wasn’t a stranger,” said Ahmed. “As a daughter of immigrants, education holds a central role in my personal and professional aspirations. Since childhood, I’ve been raised to know that education is not simply a title one accomplishes through an institution, but, rather, an experience that requires academic, emotional, spiritual and physical toiling.”

In the spring, Ahmed was recognized alongside seven other graduating seniors in the ������̳ of Arts & Sciences with the Lena Landegger Community Service Award, celebrating and honoring their commitments and contributions to service. The award, which has recognized Hoyas for exceptional service for more than 25 years, is given in honor of Lena Landegger (H’87), the mother of George F. (F’58) and Carl (C’53).

Listening to the Call to Serve

Recipients of the award, which is given each year to twenty students across the university in memory of its eponym, embody the call, articulated by Rev. Pedro Arrupe, S.J., for alumni of Jesuit universities to be “people for others,” engaged in the struggle for justice to protect the needs of the most vulnerable. 

For Ahmed, that call was deeply personal, and reflected the personal growth that is essential to a Georgetown education. 

“I didn’t seek out these opportunities because they were service-oriented projects, but rather because they resonated with my values, interests and own past,” said Ahmed. “Having these shared experiences, such as translating for my parents during medical appointments, college applications and day-to-day life, allowed me to better connect with the communities I worked alongside.”

In addition to her work with the Lutheran Social Services, Ahmed became involved with the , or DCSP, a program of the Center for Social Justice Research, Teaching & Service. There, she also taught ESL lessons to recently-arrived migrant children from the United States’ southern border. 

“My responsibilities included family outreach, leading information sessions on the Washington, DC, migration context and organizing local advocacy initiatives like distributing school supplies” said Ahmed. “Through this role, I honed my leadership and communication skills by advocating for migrant justice.” 

The through line connecting both programs was an attitude of service in collaboration and fellowship with others. 

“It can be tricky to traverse how to be in solidarity with a community, without disempowering them,” said Ahmed. “What I’ve learned is that service can not be done with the perspective that you are ‘helping’ or ‘giving a voice’ to the communities that you are working with, rather, service must be done from a place of solidarity, and by using your resources to amplify and uplift their narratives.” 

Combining the Personal and the Academic

Like Ahmed, Caroline Vail (C’24) found a second home in the DC Schools Project during her time on the Hilltop. 

“I worked with the DC Schools Project during all 4 of my years at Georgetown,” said Vail. “I was a tutor for 5 semesters, and in the spring of my junior year, I became a coordinator on our school-based team.” 

As a coordinator, Vail supported a small team of tutors as they worked with immigrant students in DC Public Schools on their English language skills. This role involved coordinating with the group’s on-site contacts at the school, communicating with parents and building community among the tutoring team. 

“The biggest lessons I learned from this work were from the relationships that I built with the tutees and their parents, which taught me the importance of working in collaboration with a community rather than simply providing a service or charity to or for a community,” said Vail. 

Vail’s interest in service-based education extended into her academic life. While double-majoring in both linguistics and Portuguese, Vail tacked on a minor in education, inquiry and justice. Her senior honors thesis in linguistics explored the language learning needs of the recently-arrived migrant population that she worked with through DCSP and sought to create a task-based curriculum for tutoring centered on those needs. 

For Vail, her passion for justice is inextricably tied to her faith. On the Hilltop, Vail was deeply involved in campus ministry, serving as a student leader with Chi Alpha, an inter-denominational Christian community. 

“Grounding my commitment to enter into the struggle of the migrant community through solidarity is a firm belief in fundamental human dignity, which encourages me to see each community member as an image-bearer of the Creator,” said Vail. “I see a faith that does justice as one way that I can honor that dignity.”

Today, Vail lives out her ethos of service working as a Student & Family Engagement Coordinator with Center for Supportive Schools, a nonprofit organization contracted by New York City Public Schools to provide support to under-resourced schools. Working at 3 high schools in the Bronx, Vail focuses on projects to increase attendance, improve school culture and climate and promote the wellbeing of the community as a whole.

“I think my faith, and specifically my commitment to honoring fundamental human dignity, was the through line between my academics, my work with DCSP and my leadership in Chi Alpha,” said Vail. “A lot of the information that I learned in the classroom about how we learn languages or about educational equity was directly applicable to my work with DCSP, and vice versa.” 

“I think that the reason that a lot of these things were intertwined was because my motivation was always to honor people and serve the community out of my belief that everyone is made in the image of God.”

Cover illustration by Bratislav Milenković.

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This year, Healy won the Pulitzer Prize in Audio Reporting and a Peabody Award for co-creating the podcast “You Didn’t See Nothin” with the Invisible Institute, a nonprofit newsroom on Chicago’s South Side.

The podcast is hosted by Yohance Lacour, who was a part-time weed dealer and college student in 1997, when a Black child from the South Side was beaten into a coma by a group of older teens after riding his bike into the predominantly white neighborhood of Bridgeport. Over the course of seven episodes, “You Didn’t See Nothin” explores how a narrative of reconciliation and forgiveness took hold after the attack, and how that has shaped Lacour’s life. 

Healy was one of four producers who reported the story over a period of  three years and wrote the episodes collaboratively with Lacour. 

“They say good journalism comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable,” Healy said. “That’s what I’ve aspired to do.”

Healy’s Hilltop Years

Healy grew up in suburban Chicago steeped in Jesuit education. His mom, Nancy (Wendt) Healy (B’76) is a proud Georgetown alumna. He attended St. Ignatius ������̳ Prep before arriving on the Hilltop in 2001.

During his early years at Georgetown, Healy took sociology courses with Dennis McNamara, S.J., and Sam Marullo, which reoriented his worldview. Marullo’s classes, in particular, emphasized real-world applications of sociology, something that Healy found incredibly powerful. 

“All I’ve ever wanted to do is serve other people,” said Healy. “Sam Marullo showed me how to do that. He had this sincere desire to make the world better. His class was the first time I realized you could study how people interact and organize themselves and then make use of that.”

The Center for Social Justice Research, Training and Service (CSJ) opened its doors a few months before Healy arrived on campus and he remembers feeling energized by its presence. Ultimately, he decided to major in sociology because it provided an intersection between academia and real-world avenues for social justice.

“There’s an expectation at Georgetown that you’re going to engage with the world. And that you have certain responsibilities as a member of the community, to leave things better than you found them,” said Healy.

The Journey to Journalism

After graduating in 2005, Healy moved back to Chicago where he taught fifth grade through a volunteer program called the Inner-City Teaching Corps. He lived in community with five other teachers and earned a master’s in education from Northwestern University.

When the volunteer program ended, Healy went to work at Cristo Rey Jesuit High School in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood. 

“As a teacher, I felt like I was helping. But I also found that I was drawn more to the stories that students told me, and retelling them to others,” said Healy.

Realizing that his passion lay in storytelling, Healy went back to Northwestern and earned a master’s in journalism. He landed an internship at Chicago’s public radio station, WBEZ, and began building out a network of freelancing gigs and community contacts.

From 2014 until 2021, Healy edited a weekly StoryCorps segment for WBEZ. StoryCorps, an oral history project that utilizes public recording booths where people interview family members and friends, allowed Healy to fine tune his producing schools. He edited hundreds of hour-long conversations into 3-minute radio stories, on all manner of topics, from childhood friends reuniting to coming out in elementary school. 

“Editing StoryCorps for so long honed my ability to listen,” Healy said. “To pay close attention, not just to what people are saying, but how they’re saying it.”

“It’s this incredibly intimate archive of people interviewing their loved ones. It’s real people talking to each other about universal things: love and loss. It’s not like other stuff you hear on the radio. It almost feels like you’re eavesdropping.”

During this time, Healy was part of a small team at WBEZ that won a National Edward R. Murrow Award for producing a “This American Life” story about heroin users in Puerto Rico being sent to Chicago on one-way tickets. 

And then he got involved with the Invisible Institute, which is dedicated to investigative journalism that holds public institutions accountable. Early in the pandemic, Healy co-created the investigative podcast “Somebody,” which was a finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in Audio. “Somebody” tells the story of Shapearl Wells, and her attempts to get answers from police about her son’s murder.

“It’s not by accident that I’m drawn to these big stories about systemic failures. I’m trying to create change,” said Healy.

Earlier this year Healy won the Studs Terkel Award from Public Narrative for his work, which “combines deep narratives with investigative insight, spotlighting Chicago’s vital issues and shaping public understanding.

In addition to producing local journalism, Healy teaches classes in documentary storytelling at Northwestern. He still looks back on time at Georgetown with fondness. 

“Georgetown is where my heart is,” said Healy. “It’s where my closest friends are from, and it’s where I grew into the person that I am today.”

Cover photo by Steve Liss.

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The mountainous areas of Northern Thailand are home to many indigenous groups that migrated from Eastern Myanmar, Southern China and Western Laos for reasons ranging from political unrest to forced cultural assimilation. These ethnic minority groups are known as the hill tribes, with the six major hill tribe groups being the Lahu, Akha, Hmong, Lisu, Karen and Yao tribes. 

Thailand’s universal health care system offers many free services, including regular Papanicolaou (pap) smears and HPV vaccines. In order to access these benefits, however, women must hold a Thai ID card, which is verification of their citizenship. Despite having lived in Thailand for generations, many hill tribe women do not hold Thai ID cards and are therefore ineligible for coverage under universal health care.

Lack of health care coverage, however, is only one of the many barriers that prevent cervical cancer screening uptake. My primary objective this summer was to identify all of the barriers to screening through literature reviews and interviews with the women in order to develop an effective health care intervention to increase screening uptake.

Most of my time was spent preparing for an HPV screening workshop for the hill tribe women, hosted at Mae Fah Luang University. Ninety-five percent of cervical cancers are caused by HPV, making HPV a strong precursor and indication of cervical cancer risk. The goal was to create a workshop that would be most effective at increasing screening uptake. 

To tailor this workshop, I reviewed more than four dozen research papers about common barriers to screening in similar populations as well as ways to overcome these difficulties. This information was then incorporated into the workshops. For example, past interviews with hill tribe women indicated that there was a common cultural value of modesty, which made pap smears highly undesirable due to their invasive nature. Informed by research, HPV self-screening kits were chosen for the workshop. 

During one workshop, I led an activity of building clay models of the female reproductive tract in order to teach the indigenous women about female anatomy. I had preconceived notions that they would have little interest in having me, a foreign and young girl, teach them about their reproductive systems. Despite the heavy language barrier, however, I was met with so much enthusiasm. While we were able to laugh and lightheartedly poke fun at the clay models, many of the women also spoke up about some of their perceptions of women’s health, such as avoiding the gynecologist for fear of judgment. The openness and solidarity that I felt stood out to me, because our ability to connect simply as women completely transcended the bounds of language.

I have always been drawn to the interpersonal aspect of medicine and the unique relationship that is built between a patient and health care provider. This relationship is built on a foundation of mutual understanding that can only be achieved through active consideration of a patient’s identities. Social identities are a huge factor in health care. Whether it is race, religion, socioeconomic or migration status, I believe that as a future physician, I have an imperative to educate myself on the health care disparities that are systematic and institutionalized worldwide. While the research component was highly appealing to me, I found the experience of being immersed in a different culture to be absolutely invaluable. 

I hope to continue researching barriers to cervical cancer screening and take my understanding of health disparities to the next level by pursuing a Master’s of Public Health prior to starting medical school.

This summer truly transformed in the way I value cultural relativism. There are so many underlying identities that inform health decisions — identities that must be examined closely by physicians to truly connect with their patients. I am humbled and grateful that these women were willing to open up to me and share aspects of their culture and way of life with me. This shed light on the nuances of medicine’s micro-level impact, which has only bolstered my ambition to become a doctor. This was an incredible learning curve for me, and I have returned to the United States with a stronger desire to discover more, meet more people and immerse myself in spaces where I can keep learning from people who are different from me. 

Cover photo by Phil Humnicky.

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Performed in Paris, France by Fink and eight co-performers, the piece took inspiration from Paris green, an emerald-green pigment used to color women’s clothing, home textiles, wallpaper and more in the late 19th century. Paris green was notably used in paintings by Vincent Van Gogh, Claude Monet, Paul Gauguin and their contemporaries. Underpinning its striking beauty, however, was a deadly ingredient, arsenic, which led to deleterious effects on women seeking to sport the latest in fashion.  

“Researching Paris green brought us to thinking more rigorously and creatively about the toxic nature of our current clothing: in its manufacture, wearing  and disposal — and its links to noxious ideas about women and beauty,” said Fink, a professor in the and a core faculty member in the . “It only made sense to perform this in Paris, the source of Paris green, the center of fast and high fashion and of many faux green initiatives.”

For Laffin, a frequent collaborator with Fink, the piece was rooted in a deeply personal experience. While developing an anti-war piece in 2004, Laffin handled more than 40 military blankets, which exposed her to chemicals that have had a lasting impact on her quality of life. 

“Professor Fink and I met in grad school and started a feminist performance collective; our early performances were centered around this project.,” said Laffin. “Later our personal experiences around disability brought us back together, not just in terms of our personal friendship, but because of our shared vision for a healthier and more sustainable environment.”

Building on this personal experience, the piece interrogated notions of greenwashing, a tactic used by the fashion industry to mask toxic, unsustainable practices with the language of environmentalism. 

“Clothing is entirely unregulated in its marketing,” said Fink. “You can literally call arsenic green! Our aim was to create a site-specific, kinetic large-scale performance using a 100-foot dress in ways that exposed this greenwashing while creating a beautiful, engaging and playful performance.”

At the Stravinsky Fountain in Paris, Fink donned a 100-foot green dress made with eight strips of sustainable, non-toxic cloth majestically unfurled by eight participants clothed like toxic waste workers.  Fink began the piece by wrapping around her arms 20 scarves made out of the same sustainable, non-toxic green fabric as the eight-piece dress unfurled dramatically behind her. These scarves had questions about greenwashing written on them, which she then gave away to audience members and passersby.

“Clothing is so personal, so intimate, so tied up with our sense of gender, desire, fashion and embodiment,” said Fink. “And everyone has to wear clothes! Yet despite the focus on toxins in the food system, there has been no real public discussion of toxins in clothing and its manufacture — just endless greenwashing.”

This fall, Fink and Laffin are collaborating on a related piece with Cléa Massiani, the duo’s curator and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Maryland, ������̳ Park. The piece, titled “Going (Georgetown) Green”, is sponsored by the , the , the , the , the and the .

“For the upcoming work at Georgetown, the goal is to engage the students in meaningful ways and observe what happens next,” said Laffin. “It would be great if they were inspired to take ownership of the piece and propel it to a brand new place.”

Interested community members can learn more on their website. 

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“I love all things science. I love to learn about science, talk about science and demystify science for everyone who says ‘I’m not a science person’,” said Bertke, a teaching professor in the . “Okay, maybe you’re not, but you should be. You live in a world governed by science and you should be aware of it. There’s no room for ‘I’m not a science person.’”

For Bertke, the ability to parse out how the world works through observation and experimentation is thrilling, and sharing that experience with others has been the throughline of her career, from outreach work as a doctoral candidate at Notre Dame to organizing weekly STEM lessons for the Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Washington. 

Coordinating Community Outreach

When Bertke first arrived on the Hilltop, the chemistry department didn’t have a dedicated outreach coordinator. While many wonderful programs were organized by both faculty and graduate students, there wasn’t a way for the community to reach out in collaboration. Bertke happily took on the mantle of outreach coordinator, a role designed to share hands-on science with the wider Washington, DC community. 

Today, Bertke stays busy with various ongoing commitments, including a weekly program at the Boys & Girls Club, a biweekly program with Malcolm X Elementary School and regular on-campus visits to local high school classrooms. Every week, during both the school year and summer, Bertke and a group of Hoyas head up Wisconsin Avenue to the Jelleff Recreation Center, where they lead an hour-long, hands-on program for third and fourth graders. 

“There’s a big mix of students at the Boys & Girls Club. Some are very into it and some want to get it done and go back to whatever they’re doing,” said Bertke. “There’s almost always one kid who always wants to go one step further — mix all of these things together, asking questions, pushing beyond the exercise. Those are the best moments, when there are students who are really engaged and want to take it one more step.” 

In outreach lessons, Bertke says sometimes it’s the simplest experiments that are the most fun. 

“If you’re a science kid, then you’ve probably mixed baking soda and vinegar together a dozen times, but we get to work with kids who may have never done that before,” said Bertke. “It’s awesome because it’s science, it’s fun and it’s a mess, and who doesn’t love a mess?”

For students volunteering with Bertke, the programming gives their inner child an opportunity to come to life. 

“Some of the kids are ridiculously funny when analyzing the science experiments we perform,” said Hayden Giles (C’26). “Even though there are complicated elements of our experiments,  the kids not only ask diligent and comedic questions about the purpose of the experiment but often offer alternate experimental designs for future labs.”  

Giles, a biochemistry major who is pursuing pre-med coursework, plans to continue volunteering with Bertke and the Boys & Girls Club. 

“When working with the Boys & Girls Club, there’s an enthusiasm in the air that can evaporate as students get older and move into different learning environments,” said Giles. “I’m looking forward to working with The Boys and Girls Club in the future because seeing how they approach situations with many unknowns gives me insight into how I want to perform research and experiments in my chemistry labs, with enthusiasm and passion.”

Connecting the Classroom and the Lab

Bertke discovered her passion for instruction and outreach as a graduate student. 

“It didn’t take more than two years into grad school that I realized I didn’t want to do research forever,” said Bertke. “I don’t see myself staying in the lab setting, but I was part of the outreach group at my graduate school. By the time I was done with my Ph.D., I knew that education was the track that I wanted to pursue.” 

At Georgetown, Bertke teaches science courses for non-science majors, including Chemistry of the Human Body and Climate Change in the News. Even if student’s won’t pursue research or a career in STEM after they graduate, she believes they should still be equipped with broad scientific knowledge. 

“Many of the students in my classroom will go on to become policymakers, businesspeople and leaders in their respective fields,” said Bertke. “Giving those students a firm foundation of science knowledge isn’t just a good idea, it’s essential for their future success. 

Away from the Hilltop, Bertke continues to find new ways to explore science education. She founded a STEM outreach company, Science Connections, in 2016, that specializes in crafting hands-on activities and demonstrations for libraries and community centers. Often, Bertke finds that the project she develops in Science Connections serve as useful jumping-off points in her weekly lessons at the Boys & Girls Club. 

“There’s a lot of overlap between our outreach work and Science Communications,” said Bertke. “If a faculty member or community group needs a quick activity exploring acidity or engineering then I have a library, which I’ve spent years building, of resources that are accessible to all ages.”

At the heart of her work, Bertke is passionate about helping others discover the same love for science that she had growing up. 

“If I can make it easier for someone to understand science then I really want to do that because I’ve already done all the work to understand it myself,” said Bertke. “I want to be able to share that work with people and I want to give people the opportunities to learn and grow.”

Students interested in teaching with Bertke at the Boys & Girls Club and through other outreach opportunities should reach out directly. Photography by Oxana Ware (C’07, G’09).

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