2nd Lieutenant Tommy Hall ’22, Quartermaster Corps

A Mandarin major from New Orleans, Louisiana, Tommy earned the 2022 The Harold A. Gottesman ’50 Family Award in Atrocity Studies in 2022. Tommy was also selected for a Marshall Scholarship and will be heading to the University of Cambridge to study identity, mass atrocities, and displacement. As a Stamps Scholar beginning his sophomore year, he applied multidisciplinary approaches to research China-related issues. This led him, as a junior, to establish the West Point Human Rights Lab, a team comprised of 10 cadets who, working with experts at government agencies and across academia, aimed to produce a series of research papers about genocide and crimes against humanity endured by the Uyghur people in Xinjiang. Tommy created an expert conference, empowered a score of other cadets, and built an enduring foundation for the Human Rights Lab. As of this summer, the HRL has nearly 10 cadet staff members and almost forty total members, positioning to become a permanent part of the West Point landscape, primarily due to Tommy’s vision, leadership, and work ethic. In constructing the HRL, Tommy organized a virtual conference with some of the world’s experts on Human Rights, China, and the Uyghurs in February. He organized and headed a cadet team which just recently won the 100Reporters China Student Essay Contest, a global essay contest about how the US should respond to China’s treatment of the Uyghurs, beating out graduate and postgraduate teams from around the world. He and several members of his team also recently presented some of their research findings at the Joint Service Academies Mass Atrocity Prevention Symposium, which we held in person in mid-April. In barely over a year, he has made unprecedented contributions to atrocity studies and prevention, and he will undoubtedly continue to do so while in Cambridge. Currently, Tommy is serving as the Deputy Military Attaché for the US Mission to the UN in New York.