DeAnza Cook is a Presidential Scholar and doctoral student of United States History at the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. She graduated with highest distinction from the University of Virginia in 2017. In addition to being an inaugural Meriwether Lewis Citizen Leadership Fellow, she received the Ernest H. Ern Distinguished Student Award and the J. Carl Sewell III Prize for the best Distinguished Majors Thesis in U.S. History. Cook's graduate research specializes in the history of police reform, police science, and race relations in mid-size and major U.S. cities from the Civil Rights Era to the War on Terror. Her forthcoming dissertation will trace the rise of data-driven, community-oriented law enforcement in America at the dawn of the twenty-first century. 

At Harvard, Cook serves as a Resident Tutor of Cabot House, an executive board member of the History Graduate Student Association, and the Vice President of the Graduate Student Council. This summer, in her home state of Virginia, she will work as an intern with the Robert H. Smith Center for The Constitution at James Madison's Montpelier on advancing the constitutional literacy of law enforcement participants in The Constitutional