Hoang Minh Hieu Nguyen ’23 Awarded Knight-Hennessey Scholarship

Hoang Minh Hieu Nguyen ’23, a graduate of the neuroscience program at Middlebury College, has been named a Knight-Hennessey scholar in support of graduate studies at the Stanford School of Medicine. 

Nguyen is among 84 scholars chosen for the award given annually to students pursuing graduate degrees across all seven schools at Stanford University. Recipients receive up to three years of financial support and are selected based on their demonstration of independence of thought, purposeful leadership, and a civic mindset.

“My career is driven by the reality that half of the world’s population doesn’t have access to healthcare, and chronic diseases like cancer lack effective treatments and disproportionately affect under-resourced communities,” writes Nguyen, who is from Di Linh, Vietnam. “I aspire to become a physician-scientist who bridges clinical care, translational research, and entrepreneurship to tackle this issue.”

Knight-Hennessey credits Nguyen with contributing to the advancement of the understanding of cancer and neurodegenerative diseases through research at Middlebury College, Rockefeller University, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, University of Cambridge, and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. As a Social Entrepreneurship Fellow at Middlebury, Nguyen collaborated with the Kenyan Ministry of Health and the World Telehealth Initiative to establish Kenya’s first telemedicine system. 

Announced in 2016, Knight-Hennessy Scholars is named after Phil Knight, philanthropist and cofounder of Nike Inc., and John Hennessy, chairman of Alphabet Inc. and president emeritus of Stanford (2000-2016). Knight-Hennessy Scholars is the largest, university-wide, fully endowed graduate fellowship in the world. Learn more at kh.stanford.edu.