Mary Mulualem is a senior at Duke Kunshan University majoring in Global Cultural Studies and World Literature. She is currently the Editor-in-Chief of DKU’s student newspaper The LilyPad, where she oversees coverage of Duke’s China campus as well as arts and culture themed student submissions. She covers DKU as a staff writer for the Duke Chronicle’s ‘Kunshan Report’. She is also an Editorial Assistant at The Shanghai Literary Review, where she works with an international masthead to curate and copy edit the magazine’s bi-annual editions. Born in Connecticut, she is half Ethiopian and grew up in Ethiopia, Jordan and Germany because of her family’s work as diplomats, which inspired her interest in cross-cultural communication and global policy. Previously, she served as a Research Assistant at DKU’s Global Health Research Center studying the effectiveness of the 2022 UN Conference on Biodiversity. She has also volunteered as a social worker at Southington Community Services in Connecticut, as an English teacher for local children in Kunshan and at Yuefeng Dao organic farm.