2nd Lieutenant Jacob Lapin ‘23, Cyber

2 LT Jacob Lapin double majored in Chinese and Defense and Strategic Studies and commissioned as a cyber officer. Jacob won two scholarships: a Fulbright to Taiwan, which he declined, and the prestigious Carnegie Mellon – West Point Scholarship. This scholarship provides full tuition for a master’s degree in international relations and politics from Carnegie Mellon’s Institute for Politics and Strategy. Jacob plans to use his Chinese language skills in tandem with his understanding of machine learning to advance the Army’s Artificial Intelligence development mission. Hailing from Los Angeles, California, Jacob played a pivotal role in founding and expanding the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies’ Human Rights Initiative. His undergraduate research on Chinese cultural studies and the Chinese Communist Party led him to spend a semester in Taiwan at Fu Jen University. In Taiwan he connected his studies in computer science to his Chinese research by conducting a study into the Uyghur genocide. This, in turn, helped lead to his founding, with 2022 graduate and Marshall Scholar Tommy Hall, of the the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies’ Human Rights Initiative (HRI), which is discussed below. Among his many other duties, which included serving as Cadet-in-Charge of the HRI, Lapin served as a regimental executive officer for West Point’s cadet basic training.