Three Yale University Students & a Dozen Alumni Included on Forbes 30 Under 30

Three students of Yale University and a dozen recent alumni have been chosen for Forbes magazine’s annual “30 Under 30” list which honours around 600 innovators and leaders in various fields.

Students who were chosen among thousands of nominees are Anna Zhang who is a Yale College sophomore, Nyuol Lueth Tong, a doctoral candidate in comparative literature at the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, and Max Jordan Nguemeni Tiako, a fourth-year student at the Yale School of Medicine, Erudera reports.

Although they are not familiar for many people, Forbes has named the young innovators “top guns” the work of which will determine the next decade.

“They are proof positive that ambition and innovation can’t be quarantined,” Forbes said.

Forbes recognizes up to 30 enterprising young people in 20 categories every year, which include:

• entertainment
• social media
• media
• education
• finance
• sports
•  venture capital
• energy
• art and style
• enterprise technology
• music
• healthcare
• manufacturing and industry
• science
• games
•  retail and commerce
• food and drink
• social impact
• consumer technology
• marketing and advertising

19-year-old Anna Zhang, who is among the youngest honorees as the youngest are 15 years old Jalaiah Harmon and Shahadi Wright Joseph, was selected in the art and style category for her work as a photographer, designer and creative director.

Before high school, she established the non-profit publication “Pulse Spikes” which presents young visionaries, including artists, entrepreneurs and activists to the world.

“I created it as a platform to highlight the incredible work young people are doing, from destigmatizing mental health to fighting climate change.”

Last year, she designed the mobile game “Brightlove” as part of Google Play’s Change the Game Design Challenge, winning the first place.

Moreover, Nyuol Lueth Tong, who is a third-year PhD student at Yale, was chosen in the media category for giving voice to immigrants and refugees to the world in a literary journal he co-founded.

Tong is co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Bare Life Review, which is the only literary journal whose mission is publishing immigrant and refugee writers.

He launched the award-winning journal with his two friends, David Owen and Ellen Namakaokealoha, balancing his work on the journal with his own studies at Yale.

In addition, he is also the editor of “There is a Country” (2013)”, which is the first-ever anthology of short fiction from South Sudan and stories’ collection by immigrant and refugee writers titled “In Their Faces a Landmark: Stories of Movement and Displacement” (2018).

“It made people like me, and David and Ellen, want to do something to celebrate the brilliance of these communities. Refugees and immigrants are not aliens; they are and always have been a part of the American story. This is what is beautiful about America.” Tong said.

Whereas, Max Jordan Nguemeni Tiako, who is in his final year of medical studies, writes mostly about health equity, racism in healthcare, as well as marginalized groups.

He also hosts the “Flip the Script,” podcast which presents these topics to thousands of listeners and records the podcast in a home studio with guests in different professions such as historians, anthropologists, health workers, etc.

“In medical school, we are taught about health disparities but not always with the most context or nuance. That’s the gap I was hoping to fill with ‘Flip the Script.’ I felt like a lot of the mechanisms behind health disparities were not well explained or understood,” he said.

For the first time, the Journal of the American Medical Association published Taiko about his research on the prevalence and geographic distribution of obstetrician-gynaecologists who treat Medicaid patients and are trained to prescribe buprenorphine for opioid use disorder.