While interning at the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland the summer after sophomore year, Nishin Nathwani observed a high-level meeting of the United Nations executive board that he said made him actively uncomfortable. While discussing the global health agenda, a couple member states were unwilling to talk about the issue of LGBTI health worldwide. The meeting stalled, and ultimately LGBTI issues were deliberately eliminated from the agenda, he says.

So he did something about it.

Nathwani researched which international body was best suited to deal with LGBTI issues and personally contacted the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) to convey his frustration and ask for an opportunity to address the problem.

At UNHCR, he created a 25-page questionnaire that covered every aspect of LGBTI refugee life from the moment that a person leaves a country to the moment they gain asylum. He was hired as a consultant for the project this fall while “his baby,” as he calls it, was implemented in Africa and the Middle East. Eventually the U.N. will implement the survey worldwide.

Nathwani is hardly new to the world of activism. He started doing “small scale stuff” at age 12, leading an Amnesty International group and supporting their Stop Violence Against Women campaign, which he would continue in high school. By his senior year, through his work on the British Council Global Changemakers, a youth-centered network dedicated to making social change, he spoke at the World Economic Forum.

If you ask him, Nathwani will tell you that his life is “awkwardly scattered.” But there is an undercurrent of social activism in all that he does. He describes his “commitment to advancing the plight of the marginalized and oppressed people of the world.”

His work for the UNHCR was the synthesis of two topics of importance: LGBTI and refugee issues.

Nathwani grew up in Fergus, Ontario. Both his parents emigrated from Uganda in the ’70s and eventually claimed refugee status in Canada. He grew up speaking a combination of English, Gujarati (an Indian dialect), “chunks of Swahili,” and later French. \xa0As Nathwani says, “Even my own language is a fusion of identities.”

At Harvard he has staged mock same-sex Hindu marriage ceremonies, and, after the Indian Supreme Court recriminalized homosexuality, he took the initiative to get all South Asian groups on campus to sign a statement condemning the court ruling.

He is also the president of Harvard College Social Innovation Collaborative (SIC) and a writer for the Harvard Political Review. As a social studies concentrator with an emphasis on 20th-century social theory, he is writing his thesis about Theodor Adorno, a Jewish philosopher who fled Germany during World War II.\xa0

Nathwani works to bring his “whole self” to everything that he does—be it academics, activism, social life, or extracurriculars. “I have this really practical side to me, and this theoretical side to me, and my constant endeavor in life is to bring them together,” he says.

SIC, for example, is not just an extracurricular, but also a family. \xa0“It’s the kind of group,” Nathwani says, “where if someone is having a bad day we cancel the meeting and talk about our feelings. If someone has a triumph we sit down and congratulate them.”

“I wouldn’t say he’s a rebel, but he definitely questions everything,” says Claudine S. Cho ’15, co-director of the Igniting Innovation Summit at SIC. During meetings, “Nishin really makes sure that the conversation is full and whole.”

Mathew B. Spriggs, a fellow intern at the WHO describes Nathwani as “unashamably intelligent,” and says that he is able to discuss social theory and philosophy “without becoming hopelessly theoretical.” The pair would talk for hours, Spriggs told me, often late into the night, while they were interning together in Geneva.\xa0

“I think if you meet once with him, for 15 minutes, then you get 90 percent of who he is because he doesn’t really hold back,” Spriggs says. “The other 10 percent, well, that comes later.”