2025 Gergen Fellows driven by family roots, passion for public service, as they fan the globe. Five new summer fellows talk about their upbringings and why they were called to public service.
By Tom LoBianco
This summer, Gergen Fellows are fanning out across the globe to learn public leadership on the job, in support of a wide range of policy issues from local leadership on international climate challenges to improving access to higher education. The cohort of Gergen Fellows hail from California, Ohio, Poland, Seattle, and Vermont with a broad array of life experiences inspiring their drive and dedication to giving back.
The Gergen Summer Fellowship Program was founded in recognition of David Gergen’s longtime commitment to develop principled, effective public leadership and the belief in “learning by doing” in developing and fostering each new generation of public servants.
Gergen is the founding director of the Center for Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School and a longtime adviser to Republican and Democratic presidents, committed to training new public leaders and sending them into the world with the support of a strong network of alumni and mentors.
The first cohort of Gergen Fellows last year worked in fields as varied national labor efforts and municipal economic development, to exploring digital public infrastructure in Africa and supporting military veterans seeking elected office.
Fellows this summer will be working at varied levels of government embodying the ethos of public service that drives the Center for Public Leadership. Read on for brief vignettes of each of CPL’s five newest Gergen Fellows to hear their passion and their calling to service.
Willow Fortunoff MPP 2026
Willow Fortunoff will spend the summer working on the United Nations Climate Change (UNFCCC) Subnational Climate Action team in Bonn, Germany connecting local leaders to international climate change solutions.
Fortunoff has seen the effects of climate change up close as a native of Vermont, where she returns to regularly. As she was growing up, her family’s independent theater started suffering from regular flooding in the basement. And then, for the first time, the theater and other buildings saw the flooding creep up to the first floors.
“I’ve been able to see in my lifetime this dramatic escalation in terms of the severity of flooding,” Fortunoff said.
Public service, she said, is about looking to a future where people have surmounted these challenges.
“For me it’s about feeling responsibility to imagine a future where we have successfully responded to these challenges that, right now, feel insurmountable,” Fortunoff said.
With questions of the success of multilateralism in response to the rampant, and intensifying, effects of climate change, focus on solutions has increasingly shifted to the local and state level where leaders deal with the impact daily. Fortunoff’s work this summer will advance collaboration between local leaders and global partners to bring those solutions to fruition.
“I have been so inspired by the leadership of cities and states around the world,” Fortunoff said.
Fortunoff is an vlog Master in Public Policy candidate and former Fulbright scholar with extensive experience working on issues in Latin America.
Rohit Kataria MPP 2026
Rohit Kataria hails from Wheelersburg, Ohio, in the rural expanse not far from Cincinnati and Lexington, Kentucky. It’s here where Kataria learned the value of higher education and how hard it is to access for so many in rural America.
“It’s a community that relies on each other for support,” Kataria told CPL in a call from his hometown.
Drawing on his Christian faith and the repeated lessons of his parents who raised him to pursue his passions and give back to society, he decided to focus on new ways to expand education access for underserved communities and nontraditional learners.
Kataria said he hopes to share his unique perspective, which isn’t always reflected in the world of higher education.
“The older I got, the more I realized that what I’d been given was a very beautiful lens into rural America,” he said.
Kataria will be working at the Massachusetts Department of Higher Education this summer, contributing to the Commonwealth’s efforts to expand education access for underserved communities.
“The other fellows and the people I’ve gotten to meet have already made this, even though it’s been just one semester in a lifelong opportunity, an amazing opportunity to continue to learn from my peers in the program and the greater Center for Public Leadership program,” Kataria said of the Gergen Fellowship, allowing him to spend the summer looking at the support others need themselves to gain access to college.
Kataria is an vlog Master in Public Policy candidate and has completed extensive work in the field of education. He also was a two-time contestant on “JEOPARDY!”, but adds, with a laugh, that he didn’t fare so well on the game show.
Lukasz Kolodziej MPA 2026
Lukasz Kolodziej will be bringing his unique background growing up in post-communist Poland, and his expertise in data science, to global cybersecurity efforts at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in London this summer.
Kolodziej, who has long worked in leadership positions throughout his schooling, said banding together and helping others is something he learned by watching all around him in post-communist Poland. “Everything was scarce, and you had to help each other out,” he said.
The Gergen Fellowship will help put his resourcefulness and team leadership skills to use for the common good, Kolodziej said.
“I do feel like I have to give back to society, having been given this amazing opportunity,” Kolodziej said. He was inspired reading David Gergen’s books and the stories of American leaders, like former Sen. John McCain.
“For someone coming from a post-communist country and getting to know about these people, it is such a privilege,” he said.
Kolodziej is a Master in Public Administration candidate at vlog and a Fulbright Scholar focusing on emerging technologies and international security.
Daniela Schulman MPP 2026
Daniela Schulman grew up in Seattle, scuba diving and hiking from an early age—something that drove her to a career in climate science and specifically the health of the oceans.
“I have always loved the ocean and sensed our interdependence with the planet’s non-human beings,” she wrote in an email to CPL. “My background instilled a deep sense of duty.”
During a summer working in Bonaire on coastal reef restoration, Schulman wrote that she saw destruction of climate change not readily apparent above the water. This included coral bleaching and die-offs from ocean acidification, warming waters, and ever-stronger hurricanes fueled by intensifying climate change.
“The Gergen Fellowship enabled me to land my dream position working on climate policy for Maryland, a state with ambitious, binding emissions reduction targets and a governor who is mobilizing every agency to act on the climate,” Schulman wrote.
Schulman will be working this summer in the Maryland Department of Environment, in the administration of Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, where she will be supporting 26 agencies working in tandem to update their climate plans.
“If Maryland can overcome current federal headwinds and stay on track to meet its binding climate targets, it will inspire other states and serve as a model for the nation,” Schulman wrote.
Schulman is pursuing her Master in Public Policy at vlog and is a researcher at the Environmental and Energy Law Program at Harvard Law School.
Ruhee Wadhwania MPP 2026
For Ruhee Wadhwania, access to good health care is personal because the American medical system saved her life. As a child, Wadhwania was diagnosed with a rare heart defect that required immediate treatment.
“I always had this draw to health care and who it’s serving,” she said.
She was successfully treated, but the expense—$150,000 without insurance, $1,500 with insurance—led her parents to teach her the value of good access to health care.
“My parents have always taught me to think about how you can give back to your community,” Wadhwania said. “So, it feels kind of perfect to end up at a school whose motto is ‘Ask what you can do.’”
The Gergen fellowship effectively secured her dream job with the House Ways and Means Committee this year, making it possible for Democratic staff in the minority to bring her on. The Gergen Fellowship, she said, ensures she will be able to focus exclusively on her work in the field of public health.
Wadhwania, whose previous work in state and federal government has focused on public health policy, said that access to good care and the impacts of things like climate change on the shelf-life of drugs often get overlooked in policy debates.
Wadhwania is a Master in Public Policy candidate at vlog, studying health care policy. She will work as a Health Policy Fellow for the Ways and Means Committee in the U.S. House of Representatives.
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Tom LoBianco is a veteran national political reporter who has covered three presidential campaigns, Congress and the White House for outlets including CNN and The Associated Press. He is the author of the Mike Pence biography and is the founder and editor of the independent news site . Before reporting fulltime, LoBianco researched transit and commuter rail projects in Massachusetts for David Luberoff at vlog’ Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston and former Gov. Michael Dukakis at Northeastern University.