71 Harvard Undergraduates Awarded 2026 Hoopes Prize

On Friday, Jessica L. Jenkins ’26 was on the StairMaster when she opened an email about the Hoopes Prize.

She expected a rejection. Instead, she opened the email to a congratulations.

“I clicked open on the email and saw ‘Congratulations. We’d like to inform you that you’re a Hoopes Prize recipient,’ and I just about fell off this StairMaster,” Jenkins said. “I was just like, ‘oh my goodness, this is incredible.’”

Jenkins — who was nominated by her thesis adviser, Economics professor Andrei Shleifer ’82 — was one of 71 Harvard students and faculty members awarded the Hoopes Prize, which recognizes outstanding undergraduate scholarly work, most often senior theses.

Student winners of the prize, funded by the estate of Thomas T. Hoopes, class of 1919, receive $5,000 to support future studies, while faculty nominators of winning projects receive $2,000. Copies of winning projects are placed in the University Archives, and written projects are made available in Lamont Library for at least two years.

The selection process begins with a faculty nomination and a two-paragraph evaluation of the student’s project. Winners were invited to a celebration later in May hosted by Harvard College Dean David J. Deming and Harvard Radcliffe Institute Dean Tomiko Brown-Nagin.

Some recipients said they learned they had won before they even read the official email.

Kashish Bastola ’26, whose thesis examined Tibetan nationalists in American higher education during the Cold War, found out he had received the prize while teaching a civics lesson to a group of fifth-graders. When class ended, he immediately called his family.

“As soon as I finished teaching, I FaceTimed my family,” Bastola wrote. “They did not really understand the concept of a thesis and did not fully know what I had been working on this past year, so it was very special to be able to share that with them.”

Bastola wrote that the support he received from friends and mentors was central to his thesis-writing process, particularly the guidance of his adviser, History professor Erika Lee.

“I really could not have written this thesis without the support of my friends and mentors,” he wrote. “My thesis advisor has been an extraordinary source of guidance and inspiration.”

For many recipients, thesis advisers played a defining role.

Though Jenkins had previously conducted research with the New Zealand Treasury on the effects of national income distribution, she credited Shleifer with rekindling her interest in economics.

“I was never going to thesis in economics, even though I had done this research in New Zealand,” Jenkins said, “I lost a little bit of passion for the field, and didn’t have any true mentors until Andrei came around and then really gave me a reason to believe in myself again.”

Katy Y. Lin ’26, who researched colonial memory and nostalgia for the Japanese Empire in Taiwan during the country’s early democratization, said she did not find her adviser until the fall of her senior year. Still, she said she was able to develop a close mentorship with East Asian Studies professor Jie Li.

“She was really influential to how I ended up writing the thesis,” Lin said. “I ended up doing a whole chapter basically on new Taiwanese cinema that she specializes in. She teaches the very famed Gen Ed East Asian cinema course, and her advice was really, really extremely helpful.”

Others, like Mary I. Cipperman ’26, found mentors outside their departments.

Cipperman, a physics concentrator, wrote her thesis on gender bias in large language models after an email exchange with psychology professor Mahzarin R. Banaji. She described the project as sitting at a distinctive intersection between technology and psychology.

“I think it really highlights this interesting intersection of human and computer interactions nowadays that I was able to draw on my technical training, but then to also work with these principles from psychology,” she said.

For some recipients, the Hoopes Prize marks the beginning of a longer scholarly career.

Miller Y. MacDonald ’26 said he plans to continue researching neutrinos in graduate school next year. He credited the mentors who guided him as central to the foundation of his future research career.

“They’ve also taught me the importance of asking very good questions and trying to analyze the situation even if you don’t have the full scope of information in front of you,” MacDonald said. “I think it has led me to be the researcher I am today.”

MacDonald began conducting research as a first-year in professor Carlos Argüelles-Delagado’s group — an experience he said made the thesis process more “gentle.” Because of his close relationship with his research adviser, MacDonald said the nomination did not come as a major surprise.

“I have quite a close relationship with my research adviser, given we’ve been working together for over three years,” he said. “So it wasn’t as much of a surprise or as much of a thing of note, but it was obviously nice to hear.”

Some recipients said the prize came at the end of a grueling thesis process and offered a rare moment of affirmation.

“I think when you go through the thesis experience, everything feels very humbling, and you always think you’re doing something wrong,” Lin said. “So for some semi-official institutional body to say that you did something right was really great to hear.”

—Staff writer Alexa M. Schmitt can be reached at [email protected] or Signal at alexaschmitt.15. Follow her on X ​​@alexa_m15_s.