Junior Makes Glamour List

Glamour Magazine selected Meghan Pasricha ’08 as a finalist in its Top 10 College Women award, adding the junior to a long list of Harvard and Radcliffe women who have been honored in the contest’s 50-year span.

The June issue of Glamour, on newsstands now, features a photo and short profile of each finalist, along with a short blurb about her highlighted social cause. Pasricha was chosen for her efforts campaigning against youth smoking.

Glamour donates $2,500 to a charity of each finalist’s choice, and gives the finalists themselves a cash prize and a trip to New York, according to a press release from the magazine.

Pasricha—pictured in the magazine next to the headline “She’s an Antismoking Crusader”—was chosen from thousands of applicants.

Glamour selected Pasricha for her global movement, which began in 2001 when she organized a group of peers in her hometown of Hockessin, Del. to push for the Delaware Clean Indoor Air Act, which bans smoking in the state’s public establishments. The act was passed in March 2003.

Pasricha said that her biggest challenge came when speaking at the legislative hearings weighing the bill.

“One of the legislators asked me, ‘If we pass this bill, aren’t we going to hurt the tobacco farms?’” Pasricha said.

Pasricha recalls responding that she sought alternative uses for tobacco, working in a biotechnology lab that summer and arriving at the discovery that “the tobacco plant is very helpful for developing a vaccine for one type of HIV.”

On a 2004 summer trip to India, Pasricha worked with her sister Sarina, who had graduated from the College that year, to develop the Global Youth Health, Education, and Leadership Program, or HELP.

With funding from Tobacco-Free Kids, a non-profit organization, Pasricha said that she created the program to improve Indian female education and youth health awareness about the perils of smoking.

“It was fun working together during our vacations and our time together at Harvard to brainstorm and develop a vision and a strategy to impact young people around the world,” Sarina Pasricha said, referencing her work with her sister.

Past Harvard women who received the award include Priscilla Bowden Potter ’61, who was the first woman accepted to The Crimson’s editorial staff, and Nancy A. Redd ’03, recognized in part for winning $250,000 on “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,” taking in the largest prize of any African American on a game show.

—Staff writer Rachel Banks can be reached at banks@fas.harvard.edu.