Evan Lerner
Senior Yixi (Cecilia) Wang is one of four Penn students to receive a Schwarzman Scholarship, which funds a one-year master’s degree in global affairs at Tsinghua University in Beijing.
She is part of the sixth class of Schwarzman Scholars and will enroll at Tsinghua in August 2021. This year, 154 Schwarzman Scholars were selected from more than 3,600 applicants and include students from 39 countries and 99 universities. More than 400 candidates were invited to interview, this year virtually, before panels based in Beijing, London, New York, or Singapore.
Wang, from Chengdu, Sichuan, China, is in the Roy and Diana Vagelos Program in Life Sciences & Management program, administered through Wharton and the School of Arts & Sciences, and is majoring in computational biology, health care management, and statistics, with a minor in computer science. She is simultaneously pursuing a master’s degree in data science through the School of Engineering and Applied Science. She is completing her honors thesis comparing COVID-19 policy responses in different provinces in mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and South Korea. She also currently leads a research and outreach effort coordinating an international team translating articles from the Chinese Medical Journal Network for global dissemination. Wang has interned in the Office of Disease Prevention at the U.S. National Institutes of Health. She has worked on global initiatives, including a hospital management project in Kenya, a social entrepreneurship program in Ghana, and an NGO in China to help promote awareness of preventable genetic diseases. At Penn, she is the president of the Wharton China Association, a member of the Penn Equestrian Team, and has been a teaching assistant for the Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science course. After completion of the Schwarzman Scholarship, she plans to pursue a master’s in public health and work with an international organization to improve global health.
Read about the Penn students in this class of Schwarzman Scholars at Penn Today.