Princeton University seniors Emily Hove and Mya Koffie, and Elliot Lee, a member of the Class of 2026, have been awarded Rhodes Scholarships for graduate study at the University of Oxford.
They are among 32 U.S. recipients of the prestigious fellowships, which fund two to three years of graduate study at Oxford. They will begin their studies there in October 2027.
“The Scholars have achieved exceptional academic records across the humanities, social sciences, and physical and life sciences,” the Rhodes Trust said in its announcement. “They also demonstrate remarkable leadership, public service, and creativity.”
“Academic excellence is essential, but it is only the beginning,” said Ramona L. Doyle, American Secretary of the Rhodes Trust. “The Trust seeks Scholars of exceptional character who are committed to making a profound difference in the world.”
Emily Hove
Emily Hove '27
Hove, of Kalispell, Montana, is a Princeton School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA) major.
At Oxford, she will pursue an MSc in Social Sciences of the Internet and an MSc in Evidence-Based Social Intervention and Policy Evaluation.
During her first year at Princeton, Hove joined the Petey Greene Prisoner Assistance Program and tutored students at the Garden State Youth Correctional Facility — “one of the most formative experiences for me at Princeton,” she said.
She became passionate about how machine learning models and analytical tools could improve policy analysis. She interned at McKinsey & Co.’s Washington, D.C., office, which deepened her commitment to understanding how AI and technological tools could have a meaningful impact in the public sector and around international humanitarian efforts.
In summer 2024, she was an investments and strategy analyst at The Impact Center based in Washington, D.C. In summer 2023, she was a global partnerships and strategy intern with Greek House Davos in Athens, Greece. She has also worked at two AI startups in New York City.
Hove is currently spending fall semester at Oxford’s Worcester College, studying international relations and political thought. “I have had the opportunity to make meaningful and lasting relationships with peers and professors in my field of study,” she said. As a Rhodes Scholar, she looks forward to "going back to continue building community there.”
Her senior thesis focuses on how AI, digital infrastructure and U.S.-China tech competition shape governance in Africa.
Tanushree Goyal, assistant professor of politics and public affairs, said that when Hove took one of her classes, she was impressed by Hove’s judgment about setting priorities for research. Goyal said she often has to explain to undergraduates that “the ambition to collect new data can be exciting, but within a 12-week semester it can also make it very difficult to produce research of real quality.
“Students do not always find that choice appealing because [using existing data] requires a certain humility. Emily immediately understood that originality does not come from doing something new for its own sake. It comes from asking an important question and answering it as well as possible,” said Goyal. “It allowed her not only to produce a much stronger paper but also to acquire methods and research habits that will serve her far beyond a single project.”
Hove is a member of Yeh College. Outside the classroom, she enjoys playing folk music and singing. After the Rhodes scholarship, she plans to pursue a career in public policy research.
Mya Koffie
Mya Koffie '27
Koffie, of Appleton, Wisconsin, and Gilbert, Arizona, is a Princeton SPIA major and is also pursuing minors in history and practice of diplomacy, and gender and sexuality studies.
At Oxford, she will pursue an MPhil in Socio-Legal Research and an MSt in History (Women’s, Gender and Queer History).
Koffie is currently spending fall semester at Oxford's Hertford College, studying social policy, public international law, and the politics of sub-Saharan Africa. As a Rhodes Scholar, she said she is “most excited about continuing to immerse myself in the excellent and interdisciplinary globally focused community that is the University of Oxford.”
At a young age, she became passionate about domestic violence prevention and as a teenager, served as a legal advocacy intern at her city’s domestic violence shelter.
In her coursework at Princeton and beyond, her academic studies and research have focused on “marginalized communities and particularly the vulnerable people suffering from sexual and domestic violence internationally,” she said. She was a Streicker International Fellow with the U.N. Women’s Civil Society Division in Nairobi this summer and a member of the SPIA Policy Task Force “United Nations Human Rights Advocacy on Criminal Justice Reform” in Geneva in summer 2025.
Also in summer 2025, with a Liman Public Interest Fellowship, she interned with the specialized human trafficking abatement unit in the Department of the Attorney General for the state of Hawaii, where she conducted research to support their litigation strategy and policy development on human trafficking.
In summer 2024, she served as a sexual violence prevention policy intern at the U.S. Department of Defense. She has also served as a volunteer with the League of Human Rights in Brno, Czech Republic.
Koffie said her senior thesis “calls the ongoing American opioid epidemic into conversation with states’ family policies, exploring how New Jersey and Pennsylvania respectively balance reunification incentives with child safety concerns when mothers are convicted of drug offenses.”
Her thesis adviser, Lynda Dodd, a professional specialist and lecturer in Princeton SPIA, met Koffie in the fall semester of her first year at Princeton, when Koffie enrolled in her “Women, Law, and Public Policy” course.
“All the qualities that first distinguished Mya in my seminar — her intellectual curiosity, unusual eloquence, empathy, moral seriousness and a deep concern for how law affects vulnerable people — have developed even more as she has taken on increasingly demanding responsibilities at Princeton and beyond,” Dodd said.
Outside the classroom, Koffie is a member of Rockefeller College, the Student Advisory Committee Board of Princeton SPIA; professional development chair of Princeton’s Black Pre-Law Society; and a student case assistant for Princeton's Second Chance Project, a criminal legal reform initiative focused on clemency, led by Joseph Krakora, a lecturer in Princeton SPIA. Previously, she has served as the president of the Princeton Debate Panel, a head fellow of the Princeton University Writing Center, a fellow with the Africa Program of Princeton’s Liechtenstein Institute on Self-Determination, a member of the Princeton Model United Nations Team and a member of the women’s varsity lightweight rowing team.
Koffie said she is especially grateful to the “mentors at Princeton who inspired me: these fierce, smart, loving, courageous scholars and public servants and people who challenged the way I thought, and amazed me with their commitment to advancement, whatever that might mean in their field, for the sake of other people.”
After the Rhodes Scholarship, she plans to earn a J.D. and Ph.D. and pursue a law career in public service focused on sexual and domestic violence prevention.
Elliot Lee
Elliot Lee '26
Lee, of Great Falls, Virginia, was an operations research and financial engineering major at Princeton, and minored in applied and computational mathematics, bioengineering, global health and health policy, and quantitative economics, along with completing the pre-med sequence.
During his time at the University, he combined technical research and fieldwork to pursue innovative modeling and machine learning methods to improve distribution of critical medicines in places that struggle most to obtain them.
One of his inspirations to immerse in global health and health policy was the 2025 public health emergency in Botswana due to a widespread medicine and equipment shortage.
He contacted the Ministry of Health and, supported by the Health Scholars program at Princeton’s Center for Health and Wellbeing, spent eight weeks that summer in Botswana as a technical lead, working with the African Comprehensive HIV/AIDS Partnerships and the Ministry of Health to develop an optimization model to get antibiotics to the clinics that needed them.
He spent several weeks criss-crossing Botswana that summer, alongside his colleagues, visiting rural clinics. “I expected conversations about warehouse inventories,” he wrote in his Rhodes application. “Instead every conversation returned to the bedside, where logistical failures became painful clinical decisions.” One weary physician told him he’d stopped prescribing the first-line antibiotic because it had been unavailable for weeks, and he’d had to use a second-line drug.
Lee realized that if hundreds of physicians made that compromise daily, the “localized supply deficit could quietly rewrite the macro-dynamics of global antimicrobial resistance,” he wrote.
His senior thesis applied robust optimization to predict medical distribution in clinics and other health facilities in Botswana. He received the Beth N. Rom-Rymer ’73 Senior Thesis Prize in Global Health and Health Policy, and the Procter and Gamble Prize, awarded for the best senior thesis in operations research.
“Elliot is extremely versatile and picks up advanced material quickly across mathematics, computer science and operations research,” said Bartolomeo Stellato, assistant professor of operations research and financial engineering, and Lee’s thesis adviser. “Just as important, he is deeply committed to the patients and health workers his work is meant to serve.”
This academic year, Lee is a predoctoral fellow at the University of California-Berkeley, studying health economics.
Lee said he is “looking forward to working with and studying under preeminent statisticians and medical leaders at Oxford to solve pressing global health challenges that affect the world today.” After his Rhodes studies, he plans to attend medical school to become a physician-statistician, working on machine learning projects to improve patient care and global health.
At Princeton, Lee was a research assistant for Janet Currie, the Henry Putnam Professor of Economics and Public Affairs, Emeritus. He was a summer research intern at One Health Trust in Bengaluru, India, working on vaccine policy for the Global South with Ramanan Laxminarayan, a senior research scholar and lecturer in Princeton SPIA.
Outside the classroom, he worked a weekly night shift as an EMT with the Hopewell Fire Department, among other volunteer commitments. He was a residential college adviser and community living adviser in Yeh College, director of programs for the Whig-Cliosophic Society, chief of staff for the Princeton Diplomatic Invitational, and a member of the 2024 national champion College Fed Challenge Team. He played clarinet with the Princeton University Wind Ensemble and the Princeton Music Outreach program.
Among several awards, he received the Joseph Clifton Elgin Prize in 2026, recognizing the senior who has done the most to advance the interests of the School of Engineering in the community.
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