Connor Kubeisy named Harvard Student Employee of the Year
Connor Kubeisy, MPH ’25, was named a Harvard Student Employee of the Year for his work as a policy analyst with Smart Approaches to Marijuana (SAM) and its sister organization, the Foundation for Drug Policy Solutions (FDPS). The Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health student was recognized by the University’s Student Employment Office at an awards ceremony in April.
The Student Employee of the Year Award is given to one undergraduate and one graduate student each year. Kubeisy worked with SAM and FDPS through the Federal Work Study Program, part of his Harvard Chan School financial aid package. He started in 2022 as a communications and policy associate and was promoted to policy analyst last year.
SAM’s focus is a “health first” approach to marijuana—which it describes as a third way between incarceration and legalization—while FDPS takes a broader look at drug policy.
In his role with the organizations, Kubeisy drafted op-eds for his bosses that have been published in outlets including Newsweek, the Wall Street Journal, and Bloomberg, in addition to fact sheets and annual reports. Earlier this year, Kubeisy worked with a research team that was commissioned by the Alberta Ministry of Mental Health and Addiction to review the Canadian province’s approach to marijuana regulation and helped with a project about alcohol-impaired driving for the Stanford Network on Addiction Policy.
“Connor has made a meaningful and lasting contribution to our organization,” said SAM President & CEO Kevin Sabet, who nominated Kubeisy for the award. “He has established himself as one of SAM’s go-to team members for navigating the technical dimensions of drug policy. Connor is thorough, organized, and detail oriented—qualities that have consistently elevated the quality and accuracy of our work, and significantly strengthened our capacity to advance our mission.”
Taking state drug policy ideas to scale
Kubeisy started working on drug control policy as an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley, and was selected to attend the Harvard Kennedy School’s Public Policy Leadership Conference in 2020. Later that year, he began an internship at the White House in the Office of National Drug Control Policy.
He said that after his experience at the Kennedy School, he was drawn to the intellectual community at Harvard. The opportunity to work with Harvard Chan faculty including Howard Koh and Vaughan Rees inspired him to pursue an MPH. He co-authored a viewpoint in JAMA with both Rees and Koh last year on measuring drug-attributable harm, and was invited to present it at a webinar organized by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. This year, Kubeisy founded and led the Harvard Chan Student Drug Policy Forum.
Kubeisy said that a highlight of his time at the School has been learning more about state-level drug policies and how these ideas can be taken to scale. “Some of my best work has come when I’ve taken the initiative to pursue a topic that I’m interested in, such as Oregon’s experiment with the decriminalization of all drugs,” he said. Shortly before the law was repealed, he wrote a blog post and an op-ed on its unintended consequences.
After he graduates in May, Kubeisy plans to launch a drug policy organization with former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Marcia Fudge, currently a Richard L. and Ronay A. Menschel Senior Leadership Fellow at the School. Kubeisy said that the organization “will redefine the extent of the drug crisis and outline how it can be addressed,” and that it builds on two health policy projects that he pursued at the School.
