Suman Kumar ’19 will pursue a master’s degree in international policy, joining students from across the globe for the selective program.
Suman Kumar ’19 has been accepted into the Knight-Hennessy Scholars program at Stanford University and will pursue a master’s degree in international policy at the School of Humanities and Sciences.
Kumar, from Lalitpur, Nepal, majored in mechanical engineering at the University of Rochester and is currently in a master’s program in global affairs from China’s Tsinghua University as a Schwarzman Scholar.
Kumar is one of 76 members of the new Stanford cohort. The students come from 26 countries and 48 institutions, including Cornell, Duke, Harvard, Princeton, Oxford, Cambridge, Peking University, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Kumar is the first Rochester graduate or student selected as a Knight-Hennessy Scholar, and the first from Nepal.
He’ll take part in global leadership studies at the Northern California university while assuming roles to find creative solutions to complex global issues. The students receive full funding to pursue graduate degrees at any of Stanford’s seven schools and have additional opportunities for leadership training, mentorship, and experiential learning across multiple disciplines.
“I feel really blessed and humbled to be selected for such a prestigious scholarship,” Kumar says. “I think it’s fundamental for aspiring leaders to be able to work with people from different disciplines and Knight Hennessy is going to teach me just that. I’m looking forward to learning from some of the best and brightest people in the world.”
The first cohort enrolled in 2018. The program is named after Phil Knight, cofounder of Nike Inc., and John Hennessy, chairman of Alphabet Inc., and president of Stanford from 2000 to 2016. Knight earned his MBA from Stanford in 1962.
As a Schwarzman Scholar, Kumar was selected with Beauclaire Mbanya Jr., who this fall will begin graduate study at the University of Oxford, Great Britain, as the third Rhodes Scholar in Rochester’s academic history.
I think this scholarship will be a natural transition and complement after Schwarzman,” Kumar says. “At Schwarzman, I learned about global affairs through a Chinese perspective. At Stanford, I’ll be learning about policy through an international perspective. China is central in Schwarzman’s experience, and cross-disciplinary leadership is central at Knight-Hennessy. Both are imperative to any leadership roles.”
Kumar will begin his two-year program at Stanford this September, though he may add another master’s degree and stay an additional year.
Wendi Heinzelman, dean of the Hajim School of Engineering, met Kumar during his first year at Rochester when they spoke about his goal of building a school in Nepal using earthquake-resistant technology after his hometown was devastated by a magnitude 7.8 earthquake in 2015.
“I was impressed from the beginning, with his keen intellect, his creative problem-solving ability, and his drive, passion, and determination to make a difference for his home country,” Heinzelman says. “The project was a success, and Suman went back again in the summer of 2018 to complete the construction of two additional schools. Those schools were 17 hours from his home, but Suman wanted to be sure to help those in the most rural reaches of Nepal, as they needed the most help and support.”
Belinda Redden, director of the Student Fellowships Office, says Kumar’s selection comes as no surprise.
“Beyond his keen intelligence, he has proven himself an indefatigable, highly effective entrepreneurial leader who has a true heart for service to others,” Redden says. “He reflects deeply and acts thoughtfully. With his enormous capacity and determination to envision a plan to meet a pressing need, enlist partners, and then execute successfully, Suman exemplifies all the best qualities of mind and person one would hope to see in an individual bestowed the high honor and immense opportunities that come with this prestigious fellowship.”
Kumar received the Presidential Award for Community Service his senior year at Rochester, and over his four years at the University attended numerous international development conferences, including a United Nations conference on trade and development in Kenya. He was one of 16 young leaders chosen to speak at the 2017 European Development Days conference in Brussels, Belgium.
Kumar aspires to be a social entrepreneur. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, he has led several COVID response technological innovation projects in Nepal by spearheading collaborations with research labs from the University of California-San Francisco, UC–Berkeley, and Stanford. Through his manufacturing business, he built machines and equipment with waste-recycling factories for a local government, Nepal’s first aquaponics farms, and a United Nations research project in which he built a medical device used in several countries to help research animal disease prevention for farm animals.
