BY KATHERINE ERNST

In print | Published April 16, 2009

Current Student Council President Yongjun Heo ’09 is one of 18 young Americans to be named a Luce Scholar for 2009-2010. As a Luce Scholar, Heo will receive funding to work with public health initiatives in Vietnam for one year. While many grants provide opportunities for students with extensive experience to expand on their projects, the Luce Scholars Program provides funding and internship opportunities for potential leaders without prior experience in Asia.

Heo is a double major in biology and public policy. His senior thesis focuses on the way in which social safety nets better the health of citizens who live in rural regions of developing countries. Heo founded a nonprofit organization, Pemón Health Inc., in 2007 which helps college students, health professionals and indigenous Pemón people in Venezuela direct their efforts towards long-term community health programs.

“I requested to work in more of an urban [environment] in Vietnam, because I’ve been working with rural areas for a long time,” Heo said. “I’d like to work with both, but the urban side appeals to me now because I don’t know as much about it in terms of public health. However, I’m certain that, without a doubt, my experiences with Pemón Health will transfer in different ways to my work next year, ranging from my ability to interact with members of the community to how an organization operates.”

Although Heo’s heritage is Korean, the Henry Luce Foundation encouraged him to use his funding to work in a different part of Asia. “They said that they wanted your professional experience to be something that’s quite relevant to the field that you’re interested in,” Heo said. “I’m interested in public health, and Vietnam has some serious public health challenges. I realized when speaking to the Luce Foundation that Vietnam may be a better location for me to learn about the public health challenges that the government faces.” The Foundation will be supporting Heo’s participation in an intensive language program over the summer. Since Luce Scholars are partly chosen based on lack of prior experience with Asia and Asian studies, it is quite common for the scholars to participate in language programs before their departure.

Although Heo intends to work for a medical degree after he returns from Asia, he emphasized his life-long interest in broader public health programs. “I went to a conference last weekend, and a public health official drew a pyramid of how the healthcare system works in the U.S. At the base of the pyramid should be public health, but instead we’ve put a lot of money into the diagnosis and treatment of diseases rather than the root causes of a lot of public health problems. You flip that pyramid over, and the apex, which is now at the bottom, is what public health actually is today.”

The application process for Luce Scholars is extremely rigorous, and involves writing an essay and being interviewed by the Committee on Fellowships and Prizes, nominated by the college, chosen as a finalist, and sent to one of three locations to be evaluated in a two-day interview process with the Luce Foundation. Since Swarthmore put forth winning Luce Scholars last year as well — Marshall Morales ’08 and Noah Metheny ’03 — the college was permitted to nominate three potential Luce Scholars this year, instead of the usual two.

“One of the pleasures of this job is that, with some students, particularly students like Yongjun who apply for several different scholarships, I get to know them over time,” said Melissa Mandos, the Fellowships and Prizes Advisor. “The focus of the Luce Foundation is on awarding scholarships to people they envision as being the future within their respective fields, so although none of these scholarships is easy to get, I would rank Luce among the more competitive of them.”

Former Luce Scholars Randy Exon and Keith Reeves ’88 are both currently teaching at the college. As a former Swarthmore student getting his graduate degree in political science and black studies at the University of Michigan, Reeves was nominated to be a Luce Fellow in 1990. He spent the next year in Malaysia working with the Institute for Strategic and International Studies, the Malaysian government’s central think-tank.

“Even though I don’t formally do work on Asian issues, it’s still very much a part of who I am, which I think is the purpose of the Luce,” Reeves said, who is also on the Fellowships and Prizes Committee. “I don’t think a week or a month goes by that I’m not in conversation about Asia with someone, friends, colleagues, some of my family, students. The mission of the foundation was for us to immerse ourselves in Asia so that we could be ambassadors in our respective communities, in our work, in our professions, and that was certainly the case.”

“A lot of students may feel shy about approaching some of these opportunities, but there are all these resources here available for us,” Heo said. “Melissa Mandos has been incredibly helpful with so many other fellowships, so many other applications, that I can’t actually thank her enough. Swarthmore has been amazing for me. They really want their students to succeed.”

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