2022 Distinguished Young Alumni Awards Washington and Lee University is proud to announce this year's Distinguished Young Alumni Award winners

Office of Alumni Engagement
October 17, 2022

Washington and Lee University is proud to announce this year’s Distinguished Young Alumni Award winners. We will celebrate the recipients during Young Alumni Weekend, Oct. 28-29, 2022.

Shiri Yadlin: Class of 2012

As a student, Yadlin was active on campus as a Bonner Leader, volunteer leader in the Campus Kitchen, Volunteer Venture program, Generals Christian Fellowship and the Phi Beta Kappa honor society. Additionally, she was selected to the Omicron Delta Kappa Leadership Society. Upon graduating magna cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts in religion and international politics, Yadlin was awarded a competitive Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship and spent a year abroad teaching English to middle and high school students in Austria.

Returning to Washington, D.C., the following fall, she began her career as a service coordinator at Pathways to Housing, providing direct services to adults living with serious mental illness who were transitioning out of homelessness. In 2017, she earned a master’s degree in public policy with a special emphasis on housing and homelessness from Georgetown University.

In 2017, Yadlin became part of a working group at The District Church in Washington, D.C., tasked with researching and developing a vision for church engagement in the affordable housing crisis. Ultimately, Yadlin took on the role of founding director of Just Homes, the initiative that grew out of this research process. She spearheaded the implementation, growth and development of Just Homes, seeking to execute access to high-quality, deeply affordable housing in D.C. utilizing faith communities’ resources.

Yadlin now serves as senior program manager for Corporation for Supportive Housing, where she continues to pursue housing justice through her work to improve and expand supportive housing programs to combat homelessness.

She is a member of the Shepherd Poverty Advisory Board at Washington and Lee University.

John Grigsby: Class of 2012

Grigsby graduated summa cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts in economics and mathematics and a minor in Russian language. He was an active member of Sigma Nu fraternity, a peer counselor, and a member of Phi Beta Kappa and Pi Mu Epsilon honor societies.

After graduation, Grigsby spent two years in research roles at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. In 2020, he graduated from the University of Chicago with a Ph.D. in economics, specializing in labor and macroeconomics, with an emphasis on wage adjustments and the labor supply of inventors.

Grigsby is an assistant professor of economics at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey. He is also a faculty research fellow with the National Bureau of Economic Research and an associate editor of the Journal of the European Economic Association.

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