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Like many Harvard students, Sameera Fazili ’00 arrived on campus thinking she was a mistake.

As a daughter of Kashmiri immigrants, one of the first in her family to receive an elite college education, and part of the first class of female students that graduated with simply a Harvard degree, Fazili initially felt like an “an outsider.”

But through deep conversations and an interest in others’ wellbeing, Fazili built a community at Harvard — with an impact that is still felt by friends and peers over 25 years later.

“She could talk to you in five minutes, and you feel like, ‘I want to tell her my life story.’ And also she just made me think of things in such a different light. She has made comments that I've heard nobody think about,” Evelyn Chung ’00, Fazili’s roommate and longtime friend, said.

Since Harvard, Fazili has had a notable career in U.S. economic policy — advising the Treasury on international affairs, microfinance, and housing under Barack Obama’s administration. Under both the Obama and Biden administrations, Fazili served on the National Economic Council, departing the group in 2022.

But in college, Fazili thought she would be a doctor. She took the required pre-med classes, yet quickly discovered she wanted more. Her freshman year roommate had planned to study Social Studies, and Fazili decided to give it a try.

“People were like, ‘you should not be a Social Studies pre-med. Those things don’t go together’,” Fazili said. “But I can be a little bit stubborn when people tell me not to do something.”

Fazili soon discovered that the concentration was a perfect match for her intellectual curiosity.

“It would give me the ability to work across many different disciplines, and I wanted something really multidisciplinary, which has kind of stayed throughout my career,” she said.

Chung said peers across campus were impressed by Fazili’s interdisciplinarity and embrace of two of the most rigorous courses of study.

“She was just so brilliant, and she could easily go from pre-med to the humanities and social studies, which I think is really rare at Harvard,” she added.

After college, Fazili took a year off to do human rights work before beginning medical school. She soon realized she did not want to be a doctor, and enrolled at Yale Law School in 2003.

There, she took a class with Cantwell F. Muckenfuss, a visiting clinical lecturer at Yale Law School, whom Fazili said served as an invaluable mentor as she considered her career trajectory beyond law school and into policy. Muckenfuss attributed Fazili’s success in economic policy to a unique combination of intellectual agility and emotional intelligence.

“There are a lot of people who are really smart, really interested in the space, and it’s a combination of the smarts with the interpersonal skills to make use of it,” Muckenfuss said.

But a career in policy was never the plan.

“I think people would have been really, really surprised, because I was not an IOP person. I wasn’t a Gov jock,” Fazili said. “I didn’t do student council, and nobody saw me as a future politician. And I really stumbled into it.”

Nonetheless, even in college, Fazili was involved in student leadership and cared about social issues.

As an undergraduate, Fazili ran the Harvard Islamic Society, a Muslim student group. She also served as a counselor with the First Year Urban Program and led the class of 2000 as one of just two female class marshals.

“The phrase unity and diversity is one that I think is thrown around a lot, but it’s one that I think she managed to embody in the class of 2000,” said Daniel A. Lyons ’00.

Her senior year, Fazili was honored with the Women’s Leadership Award, a peer-nominated prize that recognized her work across campus.

Fazili, who is Muslim, said she was happy to have received the award for her work in the Islamic Society. The group was a space that focused on religion when she started, but she worked to expand cultural programming and encourage participation from students across a range of religious backgrounds.

The award was also meaningful to Fazili because she thought it pushed back against stereotypes that women wearing hijab were “oppressed” or “controlled by men.”

“America in the late ’90s was very different than America today,” she said. “I felt seen and heard in a way that really mattered, because to be a veiled woman and try to operate in feminist spaces in the ’90s was to be mistrusted and misunderstood.”

For Chung, Fazili’s policy career was a stride forward in representation, too.

“When she became deputy director of the NEC and you’d see her doing White House press briefings, talking to the President, in her hijab, that was so meaningful and impactful to so many people, young and old,” Chung wrote.

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Fazili’s friends and classmates said that at Harvard, she had a magnetic personality and a perceptive eye.

“The mental image that comes first of Sameera as an undergrad is her on rollerblades, whizzing across the Yard and being greeted as a friend by everyone - everyone - she passed,” Iza Hussin ’00 wrote.

Fazili’s penchant for listening and perspective-taking has been an integral part of her role as a policymaker.

“I know how to sit there, listen, take in a lot of different inputs — and really deeply believe that that’s what government needs to be able to do,” she said. “Not just listen to the powerful, not just listen to those who have access, but go out there and put yourself in rooms where you're listening to people who don’t agree with you, and understand their perspective.”

Those who know her say that Fazili’s curiosity and ability to connect people made her a powerhouse — but that she was also propelled to success by kindness.

“She moves fast, but the way that she gets people from every side of politics, national and international, to come with her is that she is a supremely gifted listener and motivator: kindness, humour, and resilience are her super powers,” Hussin wrote.

Fazili has “so much joy, an amazing laugh, and a child-like sense of humor,” Ziad Obermeyer ’00, wrote.

“You will not find a nicer, more caring, more thoughtful person than Sameera,” Muckenfuss said. “And that matters.”

—Staff writer Stephanie Dragoi can be reached at stephanie.dragoi@thecrimson.com.

—Staff writer Claire Jiang can be reached at claire.jiang@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X at @_clairejiang_.