Leen Jardat receives 2025-26 John L. Robinson Educational Fund Fellowship

The Fares Center is pleased to announce Leen Jardat as the recipient of the John L. Robinson Educational Fund Fellowship for the 2025-26 academic year.

Leen Jardat is a second-year student from Palestine in the Master of International Business (MIB) program at The Fletcher School at Tufts University. She focuses on examining the role of international development in fostering economic growth in emerging markets. Leen has professional experience at Leaders International where she served as a consultant and business development coordinator on various donor-funded projects within the area of financial inclusion in Palestine. Her professional, academic, and personal experience led her to become increasingly interested in rethinking the effectiveness of current development aid frameworks in creating sustainable paths to economic development for recipient businesses and populations.

At Fletcher, Leen explores the barriers to conducting business in less developed economies, focusing her degree on inclusive finance and consulting for global impact. As a research assistant at the Fares Center, she works on projects examining U.S.-Arab diplomacy, with an emphasis on the vulnerabilities of aid-based relations, commercial and business diplomacy, and questions of agency and independence in the Arab world.

Leen holds a BA in French language and literature from Birzeit University. She is also a visual artist inspired by Palestinian folklore. Leen is a recipient of the prestigious United World Colleges (UWC) Scholarship in 2015, where she was among only nine Palestinian students selected annually to attend high school at one of the UWC campuses worldwide. Leen graduated from UWC Dilijan in Armenia and currently volunteers to lead the UWC Palestine National Committee to select future recipients for the UWC Scholarship.

The John L. Robinson Educational Fund Fellowship provides a full-tuition scholarship to second-year MALD and MIB students interested in US-Arab World commercial and business diplomacy. Both U.S. and International students are eligible to apply.