Human-Centered Design Graduate Wins Knight-Hennessy Scholarship

Devyn Greenberg '17, who minored in human-centered design, joins Anela Arifi '20, Garrett Muscatel '20, and George Wilson '16 in being named Knight-Hennessy Scholars—along with more than 80 other top students from around the world to pursue graduate study at Stanford University in the third Knight-Hennessy cohort since the program began.

"Congratulations to Anela, Devyn, Garrett, and George on this recognition of their leadership and academic accomplishments," says Jessica Smolin, assistant dean of faculty for fellowship advising. "Their commitment to using their intellectual curiosity and creativity to improve the lives of others exemplifies the best of Dartmouth."

The Knight-Hennessy scholarship—the world's largest fully endowed scholars program—is named for Stanford's 10th president, John L. Hennessy, and for Nike, Inc. co-founder and philanthropist Phil Knight, a 1962 graduate of the Stanford Graduate School of Business, who donated $400 million dollars to the program in 2016. The scholarship "aims to prepare a new generation of leaders with the deep academic foundation and broad skill set needed to develop creative solutions for the world's most complex challenges," according to Stanford.

The program fully funds each scholar's Stanford graduate education and provides leadership training, mentorship, and experiential learning opportunities through the King Global Leadership Program, funded by Dartmouth alumnus Robert King '57 and Dorothy King.

Past Knight-Hennessy Scholars include Rex Woodbury '15 and Asaf Zilberfarb '17. For information about applying for Knight-Hennessy Scholarships and other programs, visit Dartmouth's Fellowship Advising Office.

Devyn Greenberg '17 calls the Knight-Hennessy scholarship "no less than the culmination of everything I've done to date and everything I'm hoping to do in the future."

The native New Yorker majored in government with minors in human-centered design and Middle Eastern Studies. After graduation, she was a Fulbright Scholar in Rabat, Morocco, where she taught English at the National Architecture School and volunteered at the Moroccan Center for Innovation and Social Entrepreneurship. She is currently a San Francisco-based consultant at Bain & Company.

Greenberg describes herself as "a passionate design thinker who dreams of building radical collaboration around our toughest global issues."

At Stanford she plans to work toward a joint master's in business administration and public policy, with the long-term aim of finding ways to implement "design-led innovation in our federal government," she says. "My vision is to build more empathetic and equitable public services through the lens of design thinking and design processes."

At Dartmouth, Greenberg learned how to "immerse myself in diverse settings and bring a learner's mindset to those spaces." She participated in a foreign study program in Morocco, served as an intern at the White House, was an exchange student at the University of Oxford, and worked with incarcerated women through "Telling Stories for Social Change," a course that brings students to local prisons and rehab centers for art and theater workshops.

A course on design thinking (ENGS 12) was "transformative," she says. "It taught me that every single one of us is creative. One of my life's missions is to help others discover their creative confidence and recognize that it is applicable to everything that they do."

Of Knight-Hennessy, she says, "Receiving this scholarship is one of the greatest honors of my life. It feels like a true call-to-action. I believe that each of us has a responsibility to be bold in the service of others. This incredible opportunity only inspires me to double-down on this belief, and to be intentional about magnifying the impact of their support."