Lara Ozkan ’25 named 2025 Marshall Scholar
Ozkan: “MIT has been the most transformative experience of my academic career.”
Photo Courtesy of Ian MacLellan
Lara Ozkan ’25, a Course 6-7, was recently selected as a 2025 Marshall Scholar. Founded in 1953 by the British Parliament, the Marshall Scholarship supports up to three years of fully funded graduate study in any university in the United Kingdom for American students.
As a Marshall scholar, Ozkan will first pursue a MPhil in biological science at Cambridge University in her first year, and then a master’s in artificial intelligence and machine learning at Imperial College London in her second year. In an interview with The Tech, Ozkan discussed her wide array of interests, including computational biology research and technology policy.
TT: What was your journey of applying for the Marshall Scholar program? How did you feel when you were selected as a Marshall Scholar?
Ozkan: I had heard about Marshall and other big fellowships back during my sophomore year, but it always felt like a very elusive concept. I thought it was a big reach because it seemed like the people I knew who had achieved these scholarships were at the top of their field. However, this junior spring, I saw an email from the fellowship advising office saying, “Submit your pre-application.” So, I took a stab at that and tried my best.
At the end of it, I was lucky enough to get one of the endorsements. It wasn’t easy because it required four to eight recommendation letter writers and reaching out to a lot of professors. I was really lucky that I had a lot of people willing to write good things about me and support my application. Once I finished, there was just a period of waiting. Then, I found out I got an interview about a month later, so I went to New York City to the British Consulate. A few days later, I got a phone call that I was accepted. I was super excited with lots of happy tears.
TT: What do you intend to do as a Marshall Scholar? What are your long-term professional goals?
Ozkan: For the Marshall, I’ll be in the UK for two years. My first year will be at Cambridge, studying biological sciences. The main kind of topics I'll be looking at are computational genomics and understanding sex-specific differences in diseases. That's something that I started working on at CSAIL with Prof. Manolis Kellis. I'm excited to see an extension of that at Cambridge, and hopefully collaborate between the two institutions, because a lot of cool work is being done between the two. In my second year, I'll be at Imperial College London, and I'll be getting a master's in computer science, but more specifically, artificial intelligence and machine learning.
I'm especially excited about exploring the policy and regulatory landscape in the UK. Understanding AI and technology policy is something I've always been focused on. With the EU AI Act coming out and everyone understanding their regulatory approaches to AI, there’s a very interesting intersection between a more hands-off approach and a more stringent regulatory approach. That’s something that I hope to explore in both my years at Cambridge and Imperial.
TT: How has your experience at MIT shaped the person you are today?
Ozkan: MIT has been the most transformative experience of my academic career because a lot of the opportunities I've been getting here would be really hard to find elsewhere. One of the main drivers of wanting to apply to Marshall is connecting with people, aside from just being a research scientist.
One experience that stands out to me is working with the MIT Media Lab Conformable Decoders group. We worked on wearable electronics, and one of the projects I was heavily involved in was our wearable breast ultrasound device. I was on the data side of device fabrication, but the most impactful part was bringing this device to the market. For the past year and a half, I've been working with the Deshpande Center, which supports innovations that come out of labs to reach people. Our goal with this wearable ultrasound breast device is to bring wearable ultrasound to women at home.
The Deshpande Center showed me how impactful the business components of these innovations are; I've been interested in entrepreneurship and the start-up culture at MIT ever since I got here with undergraduate organizations. But working on this device in a real-world setting helped me realize the true impact of entrepreneurship and science. That helped me in the Marshall process as well because it gave me a slightly deeper perspective on the research in terms of people.
TT: What advice do you have for MIT students interested in fellowships like Marshall?
Ozkan: The end goal was never, “I want to be a Marshall Scholar.” It just ended up that all of my interests aligned with the Marshall values. If you had asked me during my freshman year why I was applying to SBC, it would have never been, “So this can align with certain scholarships.”
I think that helped throughout this application process because I had applied to a lot of different fellowships, and I instantly clicked with the Marshall people. Everything I had done at MIT, I went for because I enjoyed it. You have so many opportunities at MIT, so take advantage of the ones that sound interesting to you because it is impossible to know where you’ll end up in your senior year.
The end goal, per se, should just be having a good time, in terms of just meeting great people, being able to put on events that matter to you, and joining research projects that make you excited. And that's what I did. If you're true to yourself, you can speak well to what you like, and you'll end up finding the scholarship or community that works the best for you.