Defender
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Jacob Tobia
Jacob Tobia (they/them) was born in 1991 and raised by a Methodist family in Raleigh, North Carolina. In high school, Tobia was president of the Gay-Straight Alliance and participated in student government. They applied and were accepted to Harvard but chose to attend Duke University, where they graduated summa cum laude with a degree in…
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Schuyler Bailar
Schuyler Bailar was born in New York City in 1996 and raised in McLean, Virginia. He was solo swimming before his first birthday and competing in the Junior Olympics by age 10. Five years later, he ranked as one of the top 15-year-old breaststroke swimmers in the United States. In 2012, Bailar broke his back…
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Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus was born in 1965 in the Ethiopian city of Asmara (now in Eritrea). He graduated from the University of Asmara with a degree in biology and went on to earn a master’s in immunology of infectious diseases from the University of London, a Ph.D. in community health from the University of Nottingham,…
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Anthony Fauci
Anthony Stephen Fauci was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1940 to parents of Italian ancestry. Young Tony worked in the family drugstore, attended Catholic schools, and was influenced by the Jesuit value of service to others. He graduated from Cornell University Medical College in 1966. In 1968, Dr. Fauci joined the National Institutes of…
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Kailash Satyarthi
Kailash Satyarthi was born in 1954 in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. When he started school at the age of 5, he noticed a cobbler and his young son working nearby. He was deeply affected by the fact that many children were unable to be educated because their families couldn’t afford it. Challenging the…
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Lech Walesa
Lech Walesa was born in Poland in 1943. He worked as a car mechanic, served in the army for two years, and was employed in the Gdansk shipyards as an electrician. In 1970, during the clash between the workers and the government, Walesa was one of the leaders of the shipyard workers. In 1978, along…
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Malala Yousafzai
Malala Yousafzai was born in 1997 in the Swat district of Pakistan. She was educated by her father, Ziauddin, a poet and the owner of several private schools, who dissuaded her from a career as a doctor and encouraged her to pursue politics instead. In 2007, the Taliban, an extremist Islamic group, began fighting the…
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Mikhail Gorbachev
Born to Russian peasants in 1931, Mikhail Gorbachev grew up under Stalin’s regime. At the age of 15, he joined the Komsomol, or “Youth Communist League,” and drove a combine harvester at a state-run farm in his hometown. Local party officials recognized his promise and sent him to law school at Moscow State University, where…
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Mohamed ElBaradei
Mohamed ElBaradei was born in Cairo in 1942. His father was an attorney who headed the Egyptian Bar Association and supported democratic rights, including a free press and an independent judiciary. Following in those footsteps, Mohamed studied law in Egypt before earning his doctorate in international law at the New York University School of Law…
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Muhammad Yunus
Muhammad Yunus was born in 1940 in the seaport city of Chittagong, Bangladesh—British India, at the time. After attending Dhaka University, he earned a Fulbright scholarship to study economics at Vanderbilt University and received his Ph.D. in economics there in 1969. Returning to Bangladesh, Yunus headed the economics department at Chittagong University, where he was…
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Robert F. Kennedy
Robert Francis Kennedy, affectionately known as Bobby, was born on November 20, 1925, in Brookline, Mass., to Rose and Joseph P. Kennedy. “I was the seventh of nine children,” he noted, “and when you come from that far down you have to struggle to survive.” He attended Milton Academy and, after wartime service in the…
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Shimon Peres
Shimon Peres was born in Poland in 1923. To escape the persecution of Jews there, the family fled to Palestine in 1934—relatives who remained in Poland were killed during World War II. Peres grew up in Tel Aviv and studied agricultural science. He spent several years in Kibbutz Geva and Kibbutz Alumot and was elected…
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