Allister Chang was a Synaptic Scholar in the Tufts class of 2012. He is an elected member of the DC State Board of Education, a board member of Bibliothèques Sans Frontières, and an advisory board member of the Library of Congress Literacy Awards. Allister is currently developing social determinant of health interventions that meet underserved families where they are.

Allister was a competitive figure skater growing up, which taught him how to fall. He studied social history at Tufts and at Oxford. For his senior thesis, he conducted an oral history of the first LGBTQ organization in East Asia, and moved to Taiwan to support this organization post-graduation. Allister studied social policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, where he was elected President of Student Government. As Executive Director of Libraries Without Borders, Allister supported library systems around the world and developed education technologies that won the Google Impact Challenge and the Library of Congress Literacy Award. He is a Humanity in Action Senior Fellow, and an alumnus of the Robert Bosch Stiftung Fellowship, the Voqal Fellowship, and the Halcyon Fellowship. Allister has been a Visiting Researcher at the Global Public Policy Institute in Berlin and UNESCO’s Institute for Lifelong Learning in Hamburg. At home in DC, Allister manages his local farmers’ market in Georgetown.