Pictured above: Matthieu Huy ’24 participates in a discussion during the Lafayette Fellowship leadership program in France. Photo by Lionel Guericolas.
Enri Lala ’26 and Matthieu Huy ’24 reflect on interdisciplinary study, faculty mentorship and a French-American leadership program as they begin graduate study in France.
During a visit connected to the Grand Paris Express, Matthieu Huy saw economists working alongside engineers, architects, artists and local communities on a transportation system designed to reshape the Paris region.
For Huy, who studied economics and environmental studies at UC Santa Barbara, the project made tangible the connections he had spent years exploring.
“Environmental issues are not apart from social issues, which are not apart from economics and public policy,” Huy said. “All these are intertwined.”
Elsewhere in the fellowship’s summer program, Enri Lala found a similarly direct connection to his UCSB education. At the École normale supérieure, he attended a discussion about France’s artificial intelligence ecosystem and European autonomy. The panel gave Lala, whose interests center on diplomacy, security and civilian protection, an opportunity to dig deeper into how French and European ambitions fit within the broader Western alliance.
Their experiences reflect the design of the inaugural Lafayette Fellowship: bringing together emerging leaders from different disciplines and placing academic questions in conversation with French institutions, policy and culture.
Selected from more than 3,400 applicants, Lala and Huy are two of 30 Americans in the inaugural Lafayette Fellowship cohort. The fellowship funds one year of master’s-level study at French universities and grandes écoles, accompanied by a yearlong leadership program featuring mentorship, lectures and institutional, scientific and cultural visits. The summer portion took the cohort through Paris, Avignon, Arles and Marseille.
Their selection reflects two distinct paths through UCSB that now converge in France.
Finding the questions behind the disciplines
Huy arrived at UCSB expecting to pursue biology, with a particular interest in marine science. A sea turtle research experience in Costa Rica changed the way he understood his own interests.
Although he valued the conservation work, he found himself increasingly drawn to the surrounding community: how the village economy interacted with the national park, how residents understood the natural resources around them and how environmental decisions affected people’s lives.
The experience clarified that he thought more like a social scientist than a biologist, Huy said.
He returned to UCSB and changed direction, combining economics with environmental studies. His education ultimately brought together three perspectives: environmental science, quantitative economic analysis and the social and historical context of environmental policy.
That combination shaped his reaction to the Grand Paris Express. The 200-kilometer metro expansion is planned to include 68 stations connecting communities across the greater Paris region, with stated goals that include improving access, reducing inequality and lowering carbon emissions.
Huy was interested not only in the project’s infrastructure, but in how its advocates built support across different political constituencies. Some emphasized social mobility, community access and decarbonization, he said, while others responded to its economic-development potential and its promise to strengthen Paris’ global standing.
“I really see myself working as a connector,” Huy said, “someone who wants to understand how different groups think and draw consensus for projects of this scale to be realized.”
Lala’s interdisciplinary path began with history.
“I knew that history was going to be the thing that rooted me,” he said. “It’s what I find beauty and meaning in: the broader story of how humans try to build things and then create meaning out of their surroundings.”
At UCSB, his work in history and global studies broadened the geographic and comparative scale of his questions, while French language and culture gave him both a personal connection and a professional path toward European and transatlantic affairs.
“I don’t think this experience would have been possible without that background,” Lala said.
Born in Albania, Lala said studying French also helped him develop a broader sense of cultural rootedness. Reading French literature, political writing and public speeches allowed him to connect with traditions beyond his immediate surroundings while building the linguistic and cultural fluency needed for diplomacy.
Mentors who opened doors
Both fellows traced their opportunities to faculty members who encouraged them to move beyond what they initially thought was possible.
For Huy, one of the first was Robert Heilmayr, an environmental economist in UCSB’s Environmental Studies Program and the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management. As a sophomore, Huy responded to a research-assistant posting even though he did not meet most of the listed qualifications.
Heilmayr interviewed him and offered him the position.
“You never know if you can get something unless you ask for it,” Huy said. “The worst that can happen when you ask for something is that they say no, and you’re in the same position you were before.”
That experience encouraged Huy to pursue advanced coursework at the Bren School with Christopher Costello. Huy also studied with Andrew Plantinga and Douglas Steigerwald and credited sociologist David Pellow with ensuring that his quantitative work remained grounded in history, inequality and community experience.
“Every economics student should take a sociology class,” Huy said.
Heilmayr, Costello and Plantinga are affiliated with the Environmental Markets Lab, or emLab, an interdisciplinary research center that applies economic and scientific tools to environmental problems.
Huy’s undergraduate work also contributed to “HEAT MAP: Hazard, Environmental and Toxicity Mapping of American Prisons,” a peer-reviewed article co-authored with Elijah J. Baker. It was published online in Environmental Justice in October 2025.
After graduating, Huy spent two years as a research assistant at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. There, he applied econometric methods and worked with large data sets while observing how economic research informs institutional decision-making.
The experience strengthened his quantitative skills, he said, but also clarified his desire to return to the intersection that had first motivated him at UCSB: economics, environmental science and public policy.
Lala likewise identified two faculty relationships as decisive.
Lala first studied with history professor John W.I. Lee during the fall quarter of his first year at UCSB. Lee later agreed to supervise Lala’s senior honors thesis on weapons technology, despite the project’s modern focus falling well outside Lee’s primary specialization in ancient history.
Lala said Lee’s willingness to take on the project and devote sustained time and feedback to it represented the kind of intellectual relationship he hopes will last well beyond graduation.
Renan Larue, professor of French and comparative literature, helped connect French study to a wider range of cultural, philosophical and political questions. Lala described Larue as broadly read, humorous and unusually gifted at conversation.
“I think being constantly grateful for the support of others after accomplishing something like this is just a much healthier and fuller way of appreciating the experience,” Lala said. “Thinking, ‘What have I accomplished only on my own?’ is just not a very accurate picture.”
Enri Lala ’26, a UC Santa Barbara graduate in history and global studies with a minor in French. Photo by Baden Holliday Rosales.
Lee is a professor of history whose research and teaching include ancient Greece and Persia, African Americans and the classical tradition, and the history of warfare. Larue’s work spans French literature, comparative literature and intellectual history.
Mentorship also influenced how Lala approached leadership. As an off-campus senator and later internal vice president of Associated Students, he learned that formal structures cannot substitute for productive, meaningful relationships.
A leader, he said, must find a “golden mean” between imposing direction and leaving a team adrift.
“It has to be something between guidance and creative freedom,” Lala said.
His Associated Students service focused on student housing, campus infrastructure and student organization funding and opportunities.
France as both classroom and homecoming
For Huy, graduate study in France also carries a personal dimension.
He was born in France and moved to the United States at age 6. Raised by French parents while growing up primarily in the United States, he often felt caught between the two parts of his identity.
“In the U.S., I felt like the French kid,” he said. “And in France, when I visited family, I always felt like the American.” He now sees that dual cultural background as an identity in and of itself.
Returning for graduate school offers him time to develop his own understanding of France rather than experience it only through family stories and periodic visits.
At the Toulouse School of Economics, Huy is beginning the international Master in Applied Economics. Students complete a common first year before specializing in a second-year track in Public Policy and Development or Environmental Economics and Policy.
Huy said the school’s emphasis on “economics for the common good” matched his view of economists as public servants.
“I see economists as being public servants, and economics as a toolkit for public good,” he said, whether applied to public infrastructure, conservation, ecological crises or socioeconomic inequality.
His interest in Toulouse was further strengthened by conversations with Anouch Missirian, an environmental economist at the Toulouse School of Economics who previously completed postdoctoral work at UCSB. Her research centers on agriculture and land use, particularly where economic and ecological processes intersect.
Enri Lala ’26 during the Lafayette Fellowship leadership program at the Palais Bourbon in Paris. Photo by Ana Catalina Vallejo Chapa.
Lala is beginning graduate study at Sciences Po Strasbourg, a public grande école integrated into the University of Strasbourg. He is pursuing the Master in European and International Studies, specializing in Security of Europe, Stabilisation and International Intervention (SESII). The program focuses on European Union foreign and security policy, including crisis management, resilience, cooperation and capacity-building.
The setting aligns closely with Lala’s senior honors thesis, which examined whether developments in weapons technology since the 1990s have reduced civilian harm, as governments often claim, or whether expanded capabilities and the volume of strikes present a more troubling picture.
Lala hopes to continue studying the relationship between defense capacity, institutional responses and civilian protection, potentially through doctoral research after his time in Strasbourg.
“Any chance you have to save lives, what could be more important than that?” he said. “Developing the connections and the knowledge necessary to be able to have a genuine impact there is the top priority for me.”
Drawing strength from difference
The two UCSB graduates did not know one another on campus. Huy graduated two years before Lala, although they later discovered overlapping friendships and connections.
In France, their shared UCSB background offered an immediate point of connection within a cohort spanning fields such as economics, physics, medicine, architecture, artificial intelligence, law and diplomacy.
Huy said the fellowship’s strength lies in the fellows’ willingness to engage beyond their own expertise.
“We draw power from our curiosity toward each other,” he said.
Lala saw that dynamic during a visit to a quantum computing company. The subject was far removed from his own academic work, but for a physicist in the cohort, he said, it was one of the program’s defining experiences.
The same pattern repeated across the program: fellows encountered subjects outside their own training while gaining access to specialists who could engage deeply with their individual questions.
For Lala, that exchange is part of learning what it means to represent the United States abroad: understanding not only another country’s language, but the “rhythm of a society.”
For Huy, it reinforced the need to compare systems without assuming that one country holds every answer.
“There are things the U.S. does great that we can adopt in France, and there are things France does great that we should learn from in the U.S.,” Huy said. “Every country in the world is flawed, but we need each other to survive. We need to learn from each other to see what works.”
Lala reached a similar conclusion through study abroad.
“Any study abroad experience is, in some deep sense, also about studying your own society,” he said. “You see the things that work abroad which don’t at home. You see the things which work very well at home which don’t abroad.”
His goal, he added, is eventually “to return to California and serve what will always be home in meaningful ways.”
Related coverage: Two UC Santa Barbara graduates receive inaugural Lafayette Fellowship in The Current.