Our scholars

Macmillan Scholar

Georgetown University | University of Glasgow

Area of study: M Litt | Environment, Culture & Communication

Jonathan Compo was raised in Essex Junction, Vermont, by his American father and an enthusiastically Scottish mother. He received his B.A. in Theater and Performance Studies with a minor in Environmental Biology from Georgetown University, and he is—with the generous support of the St. Andrews Society of New York—now pursuing a Masters of Letters through the University of Glasgow’s Environment, Culture & Communication program. An Eagle Scout, a recipient of a Georgetown’s Kalorama Fellowship and Caroll Fellowship, Jonathan has helped to renovate the offices of the Vermont Refugee Resettlement Program, researched the sustainability of back-to-the-land style communal living, and completed a thesis project investigating the ethics of discussing climate change. He is resolutely interested in how we talk about the environment, and how how we talk about the environment impacts our actions toward it. He is excited to continue this work at the University of Glasgow this fall.

University of Oxford | Harvard University

Area of study: Master of Laws (LLM)

Joe Lavery lives in Glasgow. He studied his undergraduate degree in law at Hertford College, University of Oxford, and will be undertaking the Harvard LLM in the coming year. He is interested in studying comparative public law, with a particular focus on federal structures as a means of reconciling different interests in culturally diverse countries. He hopes to build upon his previous research of analysing UK division of powers structures from a comparative perspective. His ultimate goal is to become a barrister specialising in public law. In his spare time, he is a fan of both playing and watching rugby, reading, cooking, and sampling whatever whisky he can afford.

Amherst College | University of Edinburgh

Area of study: MSc | High Performance Computing with Data Science

A native of St. Louis, Missouri, Joey Lupo has played ice hockey from age four to his final year at Amherst College. Academically, he has always been drawn to mathematics, and even more so when he encountered proof-based mathematics at the college level. He is particularly interested in the ways in which computers can be applied to mathematical research, and, conversely, the ways in which mathematics can provide insight into questions in computer science. As part of his master’s thesis at Edinburgh, he hopes to study topological data analysis, which is a recent effort to apply mathematical techniques to detect the “shape” of large data sets with implications for how computers learn from data. He intends to complete a PhD in mathematics or computer science in the coming years to eventually enter academia or the tech industry. While in Scotland, he plans to visit a few Scotch whisky distilleries, delve into Scottish military history, and perhaps even see a medieval castle!

St Andrews University | Harvard University

Area of study: MTS | Theological Studies

Flo Sharp is thankful to the Society for their generosity and will be studying for a Master of Theological Studies, specialising in Islam at Harvard Divinity School. She graduated from St Andrews University with a degree and honours in each of Arabic, French and Latin as well as earning several awards for her academic work. In addition to editing a magazine and broadcast on the St Andrews Campus Radio, hosting her own show, Flo spent time in social justice work in Dundee with Christian, Muslim and Jewish groups. It was her year abroad in France and Morocco that sparked Flo’s interest in lived religion. She aspires to using her master’s degree to work in governmental policy to create accessible and educational radio documentaries on religion. Although she currently resides in Cambridge (UK), with her father being a very proud Scot, she spent much of her childhood in Alloway, Ayrshire, known as the birthplace of Robert Burns, and as such she has grown up very fond of her Scottish culture and her own family history.

Harvard College | University of Glasgow

Area of study: MSc | Public and Urban Science

Will MacArthur is a senior at Harvard College concentrating in Social Studies with a secondary field of Global Health and Health Policy. He is interested in issues of housing justice and urban public policy, and recently completed his senior honors thesis on Chapter 40B, an affordable housing production law in Massachusetts. A life-long resident of Cambridge, Massachusetts, he has worked at the Harvard Square Homeless Shelter for the past eight years, including as Staff Director, Finance Director, and Maintenance Director. He will be pursuing a Master of Science degree in Public and Urban Policy at the University of Glasgow as a Scholar of the Saint Andrew’s Society of the State of New York, and hopes that insights into housing and urban policy in Scotland and the United Kingdom as a whole will inform his career working for housing justice in Massachusetts and across the United States.