Tiana Luo
Spring 2025 John Jay Fellow
Hometowns: Chicago and New York City
College: Yale University
Degree: B.A. Ethics, Politics, and Economics
Tiana immigrated from China to the U.S. at age six and grew up in Chicago, Illinois. She was Buddhist-agnostic in early childhood, then leaned Jehovah’s Witness in her personal beliefs until her conversion to evangelical Christianity at age thirteen. She fought hard to establish a Christian club at her secular public high school. Being an immigrant and serving at an immigrant church fellowship, surrounded by people of limited financial means, helped shape her desire to study the root causes of wealth inequality and help the poor. She led a high school economics education nonprofit, captained the academic decathlon team with a focus in economics, and entered Yale to study economics, later adding on ethics and politics in her major.
While at Yale, Tiana served on the leadership team of Christian Union Lux, a student ministry, as outreach lead, Director of Operations, and women’s Bible study co-lead. At the same time, she mentored a handful of other students and taught a middle-school girls’ Bible study, developing lasting relationships. She led an annual Dostoevsky seminar on the problem of evil as framed in The Brothers Karamazov. Apart from her involvement in ministry, Tiana chaired outreach for Yale Women in Economics, sang alto in the Yale Gospel Choir, and attended William F. Buckley Jr. Program seminars and Yale Political Union debates. She plays golf and piano and speaks French and Mandarin (but don’t ask her to demonstrate)! She is a Coolidge Senator, a Humanities at Hertog Fellow, and a member of the all-women’s senior society, Sphinx.
Tiana’s interest in law stems from her political philosophy courses in Directed Studies at Yale. Her later studies centered on classical law and society, and curing the ills of Western liberalism with particular emphasis on the writings of Aristotle, Kant, and Hobbes. In the summer of 2022, she interned for the Coolidge Foundation, which advances President Coolidge’s values of achieving prosperity with limited government. Her senior thesis was on the theological foundations of the Social Gospel Movement, one of the last Christian revivals that sought to improve material conditions for the working class in the U.S. Tiana took the LSAT in 2023 with hopes of matriculating to law school before 2028. As a paralegal, she has litigation experience at jury trial in federal court in the New York Southern District. She currently works in foreclosure law at Friedman Vartolo in New York City, where she lives with her parents and little sister.