The Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation has announced the recipients of its Scholarship and Mentorship programs for 2025. Sixteen doctoral students have distinguished themselves among more than 680 candidates. They come from ten universities across Canada as well as Cambridge and Imperial College London. These exceptional doctoral students were selected through a rigorous process by the Application and Nomination Review Committee.
We are delighted to announce that Leah Schmidt, PhD in Multi-Disciplinary Gender Studies, has been awarded a 2025 Trudeau Scholarship and we send our warmest congratulations to Leah on this great achievement.
Leah Schmidt
Research Project
PANIC ATTACK: Theorizing Security Anxiety on the Brink of Doomsday
Biography
Leah Schmidt (She/Her) is a SSHRC-funded PhD student in Gender Studies at the University of Cambridge, Department of Politics and International Studies. Her research bridges “crip theory,” Foucauldian biopower, and critical security studies to examine how anxiety operates as a political force within nontraditional security movements such as doomsday prepping, AI “doomerism,” and climate anxiety. By analyzing multidisciplinary intersections of violence, power, gender, and embodiment, Leah’s thesis investigates how under-analyzed emotions, such as anxiety, drive contemporary patterns of mis/disinformation and institutional mistrust.
Leah earned her Master of Philosophy from Cambridge as a Chevening Scholar and Rotary Global Grant Recipient. Currently an a/Senior Advisor on Human Rights at Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada, she serves as a North American and Arctic Defence and Security Network research fellow and Managing Editor for The Cambridge Review of International Affairs. Previously, she was Gender Lead for Canada’s G7/G20 diplomatic team. Named to the 2024 Canada-France “Future Leaders of Defense” cohort, Leah is also a Fulbright Killam Fellow alumna and Alberta Top 30 Under 30 recipient.
Combining academic expertise with a commitment to public service, Leah is dedicated to advancing inclusive socio-political policy and fostering responsive Canadian approaches to ontological security.