Daniel J. Hemel ’07, managing editor of The Crimson, was awarded a Marshall Scholarship yesterday. The scholarship will fund two years of study at Oxford University.

He joins Emily K. Vasiliauskas ’07 as a winner of the scholarship.

Hemel, a Social Studies concentrator in Lowell House, plans to study International Relations at Oxford.

The field has long intrigued him; Zachary M. Seward ’07-’09, a close friend of 17 years, recalled that—for a basic elementary-school assignment—his classmate crafted an unconventional submission.

“Daniel wrote about the recent dissolution of the Soviet Socialist Republics,” Seward wrote in an e-mail. “The piece probably could have run in the Economist with minor editing to correct for the spelling of Gorbachev.”

Seward is a former managing editor of The Crimson.

Hemel’s intellectual rigor has not let up since coming to Harvard, according to Professor of Government Michael J. Hiscox.

“He combines raw intellectual horsepower and inventiveness with a remarkable work ethic, and he is not afraid to challenge established arguments and ideas, inside and outside the classroom,” Hiscox, Hemel’s thesis advisor and one-time professor, wrote in an e-mail.

Hemel, who has devoted much of his extracurricular life at Harvard to The Crimson, currently fills the newspaper’s number-two post. He chose Oxford in part because of its “great journalism program.”

“Three and a half years at The Crimson have taught me that writing and editing news stories is what I really want to do,” he said.

Hemel pointed to an article exposing Harvard’s investment in PetroChina, a company with ties to the Sudanese government, as the “high point” of his Crimson career.

The story’s international scope made him realize he could affect global issues, when he saw an injustice and said to himself, “Gee, I’m the media. I’m sure there’s something I could do.”

The story eventually led Harvard to divest in PetroChina, with several other major universities following suit.

Before serving as managing editor, Hemel mostly covered the Law School and the University’s central administration for The Crimson, in addition to editing book reviews.

Hemel’s friends say that there is no one more deserving of the scholarship. “He has genuine passion like I have never seen and his kindness continues to amaze me,” wrote roommate Scoop A. Wasserstein ’07 in e-mail. “I have absolute faith that whatever his profession, he will change the world for the better.”

Wasserstein is a Crimson arts editor.

In his summers away from Harvard, Hemel has served as a travel researcher for Let’s Go Publications in the Baltics, a beat reporter for the New York Sun, and a vocational English teacher in Ecuador with WorldTeach.