The 2023 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships For New Americans Are Announced

The 2023 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans have been announced. The PD Soros Fellowship is a merit-based award for graduate study by immigrants and children of immigrants in the United States. The 30 fellows in this year’s class, the 26th in the history of the program, were selected from nearly 2,000 applicants.

Each PD Soros Fellow receives up to a total of $90,000 in funding over two years to support his/her graduate studies, which the new Fellows will be pursuing at several of the leading universities in the nation.

The 30 recipients and their graduate school plans are:

Ashri Anurudran, MD at Harvard University; Kidist Ashami, PhD in biological and biomedical sciences at Harvard University; Beshouy Botros, PhD in history at Yale University; Yehimi Cambrón Álvarez, MFA in print media at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; Zhanlin Chen, MD at Northwestern University; Tan Dao, PhD in physics at Harvard University; Desmond Edwards, PhD in microbiology and immunology at Stanford University; Freja Ekman, MD/PhD in genetics at Stanford University; Dhruv Gaur, PhD in economics at MIT; Ricardo Guajardo, MD/PhD in neuroscience at University of California San Francisco.

Silvia Huerta Lopez, MD/PhD in biological sciences at Harvard University; Philsan Isaak, JD at Yale University; Kathrin (Kat) Kajderowicz, PhD in neuroscience at MIT; Jaspreet Kaur, MFA in writing for screen & television at University of Southern California; Arjun Menta, MD at Johns Hopkins University; Anna Li, MD/PhD in computational biology at the University of Pittsburgh & Carnegie Mellon University; Adriana Liimakka, MD/MBI in biomedical informatics at Harvard University; Jimmy Lin, PhD in economics zt MIT; Omair M. Khan, MD/PhD in stem cell biology and regenerative medicine at Stanford University; Nathan Mallipeddi, MD/MBA at Harvard University and Stanford University.

Eana Xuyi Meng, MD/PhD in history of science at Harvard University; Vaibhav Mohanty, MD/PhD in chemistry at Harvard University and MIT; Juliet Nwagwu Ume-Ezeoke, PhD in civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University; Janel Pineda, PhD in Chicana/o and Central American studies at the University of California Los Angeles; Shyamala Ramakrishna, JD at Yale University; Jermaine Anthony Richards, PhD in communication at the University of Southern California; Steven Truong, MD/PhD in biosciences at Stanford University; Daniela Veloza, MBA at Harvard University; Shomik Verma, PhD in mechanical engineering at MIT; Cinthia Zavala Ramos, JD at New York University.

Biographies of the recipients can be found here.

The new cohort earned their undergraduate degrees from 19 different institutions in the U.S., ranging from small private c0lleges like Berea College in Kentucky and Agnes Scott College in Georgia to major research universities like the University of Minnesota, UCLA, Cornell and the University of Pennsylvania. Seven fellows earned their undergraduates degrees at Harvard; four graduated from Yale; and MIT and Duke University had two graduates each.

This year’s group of Paul & Daisy Soros Fellows have their heritage in China, Colombia, Egypt, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Honduras, India, Jamaica, Mexico, Nigeria, Norway, Pakistan, Poland, Somalia, Sri Lanka, Sweden, and Vietnam. Their graduate studies span a wide range of fields, including law, medicine, economics, neuroscience, screenwriting, physics, Chicano and Central American Studies, painting, women’s gender and sexuality studies, mechanical engineering, computational biology, and genetics.

“Immigrants, asylum seekers, and refugees have and continue to make our nation stronger. This year, 30 exemplary Fellows were selected to pursue a breadth of graduate studies from screenwriting to medicine and from physics to painting at institutions like Harvard, UC Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, MIT, and Stanford. Each year, our Fellows inspire us with the impact their diverse perspectives and innovative approaches have on their fields of work and the ingenuity they bring to their communities and disciplines,” said Craig Harwood, Director of the PD Soros Fellowships for New Americans Program.

Harwood added, “We want to shift our national conversation to focus on what immigrants contribute to our country. We are lucky to have the greatest minds from around the world coming to our universities to study and make their lives here.”

Paul and Daisy Soros were Hungarian immigrants who established their Fellowships for New Americans in 1997 with a charitable trust of $50 million. Paul Soros, who passed away in 2013, was a mechanical engineer, inventor, businessman, and the founder of Soros Associates. In 2010, the couple contributed an additional $25 million to the charitable trust that funds the fellowships.

“My and Paul’s experiences as immigrants informed our desire to give back by investing in the accomplishments of New Americans,” said Daisy Soros, in a press release. “It has been a joy to see how our Fellows leverage their education over the years to make a deep impact across communities. I’m delighted to welcome this year’s Fellowship class. As we commemorate the 10th anniversary of Paul’s passing, it is beautiful to see how his legacy lives on through every Fellow.”

The program has now provided more than $80 million in funding to 775 Fellows from 103 countries to pursue the graduate degrees of their choosing. Past recipients include U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, the first Surgeon General of Indian descent; lawyer Julissa Reynoso, U.S. Ambassador to Spain and Andorra; Damian Williams, the first Black U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York; and composer Paola Prestini, who was named by NPR as one of the “Top 100 Composers in the World.”