Lily Yan, Johns Hopkins University

Lily Yan is a rising senior at Johns Hopkins University, where she studies International Studies and East Asian Studies with a focus on World Politics and Global Governance. Originally from Beijing, she moved to the United States as a teenager and grew up in the Tacoma, Washington area. Her interest in immigration policy is rooted in her own experience navigating the U.S. immigration system — an experience that shaped her commitment to making policy accessible and understandable to the communities it affects most.
At Hopkins, Lily works as a research assistant on projects spanning public attitudes toward inequality, U.S. defense policy discourse, and political economy and development theory. She has also conducted independent research on how partisanship and lived experience shape Americans’ immigration attitudes, using semi-structured interviews in both English and Mandarin. Previously, she interned at the Anti-Defamation League’s Pacific Northwest office in Seattle, where she coordinated congressional outreach across five states, supported incident response operations, and attended cross-sector meetings with the U.S. Attorney’s Office, FBI, and local law enforcement.
Lily speaks fluent Mandarin and English, intermediate Spanish, and beginner French. Outside of academics, she is a musician who played second trombone in the Tacoma Youth Symphony and enjoys photography.

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