Robinson Tom’s interest in STEM and his passion for giving back to his Navajo Nation community have always been intertwined.

Tom, a second-year Ph.D. student in bioengineering at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), first became interested in science while serving as a linguist in the United States Army from 2010-14.

“I worked with electronic warfare devices, which let me listen in on enemy radio frequencies in Afghanistan,” he said. “Placing these instruments in adverse...