Two Princeton seniors and one Oxford student named Sachs Scholars

Princeton seniors Sukaina Shivji and Laura Zhang, and University of Oxford student Darina Andriychenko Leonenko have been named recipients of the Daniel M. Sachs Class of 1960 Graduating Scholarship, one of Princeton University’s highest awards.

Shivji has been named as the Sachs Global Scholar and Zhang has been named as the Sachs Scholar at Worcester College at the University of Oxford. Andriychenko Leonenko will spend next academic year as a Sachs Visiting Scholar at Princeton.

The Sachs Scholarship is intended to broaden the global experience of its recipients by providing them with the opportunity to study, work or travel abroad after graduation. It was established by classmates and friends of Daniel Sachs, a distinguished Princeton student athlete in the Class of 1960 who attended Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. He died of cancer at age 28 in 1967. The award is given to those who best exemplify Sachs’ character, intelligence and commitment, and whose scholarship is most likely to benefit the public.

Sukaina Shivji

Shivji, of Staten Island, New York, came to Princeton as a QuestBridge Scholar. She is a molecular biology major and is pursuing a minor in global health and health policy. 

A member of Rockefeller College, she received the Shapiro Prize for Academic Excellence in 2024. Her senior thesis focuses on optimizing and subsequently applying the CRISPR gene-editing tool to study early development in fruit flies.

Shivji will use her Sachs Global Scholarship to pursue a two-year degree through the Erasmus Mundus Joint Master Degree in Public Health in Disasters, which will include studies at the University of Oviedo in Spain, the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden and the University of Nicosia in Cyprus.

After her Sachs studies, she plans to attend medical school and hopes to work as a physician with underserved populations. Her application essay recounted the challenges she and her family faced to make ends meet and her responsibilities as a caregiver for her father, who has multiple chronic illnesses. As a Princeton undergraduate, she volunteered in the emergency department of Bellevue Hospital in New York City.

“In my role as patient advocate, I witnessed much suffering,” she wrote in her application essay. She quickly learned that “resourcefulness was crucial” for physicians to treat patients who were uninsured or faced obstacles in finding supportive services. 

Her coursework focused on health inequity and health systems abroad, including the seminar “Critical Perspectives in Global Health Policy,” taught by Heather Howard, professor of the practice at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, and co-director of the Program in Global Health and Health Policy,

“Sukaina brings together ethical imagination, deep compassion, and a strong grasp of the institutional and social forces that shape access to health and wellness,” Howard said.

Elizabeth Gavis, the Damon B. Pfeiffer Professor in the Life Sciences and professor of molecular biology and department chair, who taught Shivji in “Introduction to Cellular and Molecular Biology” and is her thesis adviser, said she “combines exceptional intelligence and drive with humility.”

Shivji cofounded the student group Creative Care and helped design its Health Outpost project, a mini health resources library with installations around campus. 

She is the director of Camp Kesem Princeton, a free weeklong sleepaway summer camp on campus for children affected by a caregiver’s cancer. She is also a member of the Scholars Institute Fellows Program, a member of the Princeton University Skating Club, and a peer with Sexual Harassment/Assault Advising, Resources and Education (SHARE). She is the former communications chair for Princeton’s Muslim Student Association.

“I’ve spent so much of my time at Princeton attempting to amplify the voices of others,” she said. “This scholarship allows me to extend this work beyond Princeton in ways that I never imagined. I hope to always lead with humility.”

Laura Zhang

Zhang, of Sydney, Australia, is majoring in the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA) and pursuing minors in humanistic studies and European studies, and a certificate in history and the practice of diplomacy. A member of Butler College, she is a member of the Phi Beta Kappa Society and received the Shapiro Prize for Academic Excellence in 2023.

At Oxford, she plans to earn an MSc in criminology and criminal justice and an MSc in refugee and forced migration studies. She will then attend Harvard Law School, where she has been accepted through the Junior Deferral Program, and plans to pursue a career in international human rights law.

Zhang’s interest in refugee rights was sparked in an anthropology seminar when she read Kurdish writer Behrouz Boochani’s memoir recounting the violence he experienced in an offshore detention center in Manus Island, Papua New Guinea, where he had been transferred after attempting to seek asylum in Australia.

Onur Günay, lecturer in anthropology, said Zhang stood out in that seminar and another he taught, with “a rare combination of intellectual rigor, ethical seriousness, and generosity toward others. In both classes, her work on migration and refugee governance was original, deeply thoughtful, and grounded in a strong sense of moral responsibility.”

Zhang traveled to Geneva last summer as a researcher with Princeton SPIA’s Policy Advocacy Clinic.

Sophie Meunier, senior research scholar in public and international affairs and the director of the Program in Contemporary European Politics and Society, met Zhang in fall 2024, when Meunier was director of the Liechtenstein Institute of Self-Determination at Princeton and Zhang was an international policy associate. 

“On our trips to Europe and Asia, I was impressed by her unusual combination of thoughtfulness, friendliness, enthusiasm, awe, and gratefulness at the opportunities offered by the program for high-level meetings with policymakers,” said Meunier, who also advised Zhang’s junior paper. Zhang also took Meunier’s policy research seminar, for which “she produced a really thought-provoking paper on the linkages between deportations and electoral cycles,” Meunier said. 

Zhang’s senior thesis, advised by Barbara Buckinx, a research scholar and lecturer in Princeton SPIA, focuses on determinants of offshore immigration detention policy in Australia and the United Kingdom. 

Zhang is a member of the Behrman Undergraduate Society of Fellows, which brings together juniors and seniors committed to the study of humanistic inquiry. She has interned at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the World Wildlife Fund’s Markets Institute in Washington, D.C., and the Institute for Democracy and Economic Affairs in Kuala Lumpur.

Outside of her academic studies, Zhang is founder and president of the Oceanic Society at Princeton, a fellow at the Writing Center, student coordinator at the Davis International Center, and financial vice president of the Princeton Debate Panel. She volunteered for the Service Focus Clemency Initiative under the guidance of New Jersey public defender Joe Krakora, who is also a lecturer in Princeton SPIA.

Darina Andriychenko Leonenko

Andriychenko Leonenko, of Newcastle, United Kingdom, is currently a DPhil candidate in environmental physics at Worcester College at the University of Oxford. She will spend next year as a visiting graduate student working with the Department of Computer Science, the Program in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, and the High Meadows Environmental Institute, where she plans to continue her research on evaluating how state-of-the-art AI forecasting models perform when predicting extreme weather events.

She also plans to pursue the Princeton SPIA graduate policy certificate in science, technology and environmental policy.

“Analyzing where and how AI-based and traditional physics-based simulations diverge serves as an important ‘stress test,’ since predicting extreme events is both challenging and essential for warning local communities and enabling proactive emergency response,” she said. “Moreover, evaluating these models across different climate scenarios informs longer-term adaptation planning and, hopefully, policy decisions.”

Andriychenko Leonenko is the inaugural AlbaCore Capital scholar at Oxford’s highly competitive Intelligent Earth Centre for Doctoral Training in AI for the Environment. 

“Darina is a stellar student,” said her Oxford supervisor Myles Allen, professor of geosystem science and head of atmospheric, oceanic and planetary physics. “Princeton and Oxford have been leading the world on the application of machine-learning-based weather forecast models to quantify the impact of climate change on extreme weather events, so the Sachs Scholarship is a great opportunity for us to work together.” 

The sweltering summer of 2022 fueled Andriychenko Leonenko's commitment to environmental research. She has studied tsunami detection technology in Tokyo and researched ice floe distribution in the Arctic Ocean to develop models designed to help ships track ice in a complex and rapidly changing environment. Following her master’s research project, she participated in a field trip to Peru to study glacial melt in the Andes.

Hugo Lepage, a fellow at the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge, and her supervisor on the Andes expedition, commended her work under challenging conditions, where the team was validating models for predicting glacial lake outbursts and changing melt rates at an altitude of nearly 5,000 meters.

“When a landslide blocked the roads, we were forced to continue our expedition on horseback,” he said. “Darina consistently exceeded expectations. She collected data while teaching students and staff from local universities.”

Andriychenko Leonenko holds an MSci and BA in physics from the University of Cambridge, where she received double first class honors. Her academic awards include the Samuel Taylor Scholarship at Cambridge, where she also was head of competitive debating at The Cambridge Union, a public speaking coach with the English Speaking Union, finance officer of the Cambridge Climate Society and president of the Wilson-Walker Society. She also competed on her Cambridge college's chess and rowing teams.

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