Pair of alums headed to Alabama for public health fellowship
The Office of Fellowhips is excited to announce that Nathan Siskel (SOC ’25) and Suzie Bian (WCAS ’24) were chosen for the 2025–2026 cohort of the Project Horseshoe Farm Community Health Fellowship! Over the next year, Nathan will serve the fellowship at its location in Marion, Alabama, while Suzie will work in the fellowship’s Greensboro location, also in Alabama.
Hailing from Chicago, Nathan is a 2025 graduate with a double major in psychology and radio/television/film. In 2023, he worked at the intersection of these two majors by creating an animated short film about depression and recovery as a fellow in Northwestern’s Pritzker Pucker Studio Lab for the Promotion of Mental Health via Cinematic Arts. As an intern at the Chicago location of the National Alliance on Mental Illness in 2024, he learned about the policies that influence access to mental healthcare. He also conducted narrative psychology research for two years in the Study of Lives Research Group at Northwestern, culminating in a senior thesis about how 164 participants incorporated suffering into the story of their lives.
At Project Horseshoe Farm, Nathan is excited to learn more about mental healthcare through direct service and community engagement. After Nathan completes the fellowship, he plans to bring the experience back to Chicago to help improve access to healthcare and social support systems.
Suzie is from New Berlin, Wisconsin, right outside Milwaukee, and graduated from Northwestern with majors in neuroscience and Asian American studies in 2024. Alongside her coursework, Suzie was also involved in undergraduate research, highlighted by a senior year honors thesis that analyzed literature through a lens of critical race theory, gender studies, and disability justice to provide recommendations to healthcare workers on using cultural humility in their work with Asian American elders.
Outside of the classroom, Suzie was very involved with Camp Kesem, an organization that provides free summer camp to children affected by a parent or guardian’s cancer diagnosis. She spent all four years of her college career volunteering as a counselor for the program. She also served for two years on the executive board as the operations coordinator and then as the teen leadership program coordinator, creating youth programming, ordering supplies, working with the campsite directors, and running day-to-day operations. Suzie was also involved with Books and Breakfast, an Evanston organization dedicated to closing inequities in Evanston elementary schools through before-school programming. She spent four years volunteering as a tutor at this organization.
Suzie spent the past year as a youth program coordinator at the Chinese Mutual Aid Association, a nonprofit providing social services to immigrants and refugees in Uptown Chicago. She coordinated the afterschool, family literacy, and mentoring programs in this role, skills that prepared her well for the Project Horseshoe Farm fellowship.
Nathan and Suzie will be the tenth and eleventh Wildcats to complete the fellowship. Ryley Boddeker-O’Connor (SESP ’23) was chosen for the fellowship two years ago and is the most recent Wildcat to complete the program. In 2022, Samira Asseh (SESP ’22) became the first Wildcat placed in the fellowship’s location in Pomona, California. Catherine Chen (McCormick ’21) won the fellowship in 2021 and was preceded by Pooja Kanthawar (SESP ’17) and Mary Stoa (WCAS ’20) in 2020. In 2018, Priya Garigipata (WCAS ’17) joined the cohort, while Timothy Huang (WCAS ’17) and Kevin Wang (WCAS ’17) were selected in 2017. In 2016, Rafa Ifthikar (WCAS ’16) was the first Northwestern graduate chosen for the program.
Contact Jason Kelly Roberts at jason-roberts@northwestern.edu to learn more about the Project Horseshoe Farm Fellowship.