Miles Cooper ’17 has received a highly competitive, yearlong Princeton in Asia fellowship. Cooper, a molecular and cellular biology major from New York City, will serve as a Princeton in Asia fellow in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, for the 2017-18 fellowship cycle. He will be working with ChildFund, an organization that promotes children’s rights. Although based in Cambodia’s capital city, he will split his time between three offices around the country working on various ChildFund programs.

Cooper spent last summer in the South Bronx, working on subscription drug abuse and interviewing synthetic marijuana addicts. In the summer of 2015 he received internship funding from Colorado College’s Career Center to travel to Kasese Township in Uganda to work with YAPI (Young and Powerful Initiative). His work there involved conducting AIDS tests, youth sex education, and helping orphans and other at-risk youth stay educated and empowered.

Additionally, Cooper has served as the treasurer of CC’s Black Student Union, authored an article on PTSD for the Cipher magazine and subsequently was invited to be a speaker at a panel discussion at the University of Colorado – Colorado Springs, and was part of Integrative Design Group (IDG) that built the solitary confinement boxes on Worner Quad last spring for the Prison Project.

Founded in 1898, Princeton in Asia (PiA) has been building bridges between the U.S. and Asia for more than a century. PiA’s original mission is as meaningful and vital today as it was 118 years ago. The need to educate Americans about Asia and to help Asian communities better understand the United States has never been higher.

Princeton in Asia sponsors more than 150 fellowships and internships in 21 countries and is the oldest and largest organization of its kind, unique in its scope, size, century-long expertise and emphasis on service. The essence of the organization is to provide transformative, service-oriented experiences for bright, talented graduates and to serve the needs of Asia as determined by host institutions and Asian partners.

PiA arranges fellowships and internships with Asian host organizations that contribute to important global issues at the local level: education, public health, environmental sustainability, access to information/media, economic development and social justice. Fellowships are the means of fostering person-to-person diplomacy, enhancing mutual understanding, contributing to communities with unmet needs and providing transformative experiences for fellows and host communities.