YSM Issue 95.1

UNDERGRADUATE PROFILE
KATE PUNDYK
BF ’22
BY CATHERINE ZHENG
Amidst a mess of flour and dough in a small San Francisco
apartment, one can find 2022 Rhodes Scholar Kate Pundyk
baking away, having set stacks of research journals and
books on technology policy aside to try out a new recipe. While
STEM and the humanities often find themselves on opposite ends
of the spectrum, Pundyk found her calling in the intersection of
technology and social policy through a long-winding path with
many different research experiences and universities.
Pundyk first left her home in rural Crowsnest
Pass in Canada at seventeen-years-old to
live in Hong Kong. During her stay, she
witnessed firsthand how the citizens
stood up for their rights during
the Umbrella Revolution. “[I]
realized how powerful activism
can be, even in situations where
it feels like the opponent is a
very large and very powerful
entity,” Pundyk said. This
experience abroad quickly
became a turning point
in her life, motivating her
continued work in social
justice and activism.
Pundyk started her college
education as a political
science student at Wellesley
College following her two-year
stay in Hong Kong. She found
herself traveling to Cambridge each
semester to take classes at MIT. With her
time split between taking more humanitiesoriented
classes at Wellesley and technologyfocused
classes at MIT, the intersection between the two
came about naturally. “It was impossible to go from any of the
foreign policy, world politics courses that I kind of gravitated
to, and then go to my cybersecurity class at MIT and not think
about how those two overlapped,” Pundyk said.
Pundyk became involved in the MIT Little Devices Lab during
her time at Wellesley, which focuses on creating affordable
medical technology for people in disaster or low-resource
settings. As a technology policy researcher and political science
student, she was primarily involved in researching how access
to medical devices depended on financial stability. For example,
she investigated how big pharma’s corporate nature affects
engineering and technology access, preventing low-income
people from getting the medical care they need.
After two years at Wellesley, Pundyk decided to return to Canada
and work in the Office of the Premier in Alberta. With just two years
of undergraduate education under her belt, Pundyk was adamant
about pursuing her interests and creating change in fields that she
believed mattered, taking part in progressive campaigns. Later in
2019, Pundyk transferred to Yale to pursue her interest in technology
policy and its role in human rights abuses and equity.
At Yale, she found herself involved in a host of different
activities and organizations. One of the most notable was
reporting for the Sci-Tech desk at the Yale Daily
News (YDN). Having worked in government,
Pundyk knew that the ability to
communicate technical subjects to
lay audiences was lacking in many
politics-oriented communities,
and this was something she
was hoping to work on at the
YDN. With the COVID-19
pandemic, it was especially
important for her to easily
communicate the newly
discovered science and
engineered technology to a
broader audience.
While the pandemic
didn’t alter the course of
her education too much,
it became clear to Pundyk
that she was following the
right path. “COVID highlighted
the cleavages in our society that
urgently need to be focused [on].
[It] clarified that I’m making the right
choices and going for a career that centers
human rights and tries to build up other voices
that might be left out of the discussion,” she said.
In addition to the YDN, Pundyk started working with the Yale
Genocide Studies Program on a project known as Mass Atrocities
in the Digital Era (MADE). As part of this project, she brought
a technology-oriented angle to the research, focusing on how
technology plays a role in bringing about human rights injustices,
specifically looking into the accountability of human rights abusers,
memorialization of victims, and prevention of future atrocities.
For the upcoming fall semester, Pundyk will continue studying
the intersection of social policy and technology at Oxford during
her Rhodes scholarship, pursuing a Master of Science degree in
social data science and a Master of Philosophy degree in socio-legal
research. She is looking forward to moving home to Canada after
graduating from Oxford. “[It] was less about any individual feat and
more a confluence of a bunch of good things happening in a row and
being surrounded by good people who built me up,” Pundyk said. ■
PHOTO COURTESY OF KATE PUNDYK VIA ALEX DONG
34 Yale Scientific Magazine March 2022 www.yalescientific.org