The Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans, founded by Paul Soros and Daisy Soros in 1997, is a United States postgraduate fellowship for immigrants and children of immigrants. [1] [2] In 2021, the fellowship received 2,445 applications and awarded 30 fellowships for a selection rate of 1.2%. [1] [3] Each fellow receives up to $90,000 in funding toward their graduate education, which can be in any field and at any university at the U.S. The fellowship, which honors the contributions of immigrants to the U.S., was founded in 1997. [4] In 2010, the couple had contributed a total of $75 million to the organization's charitable trust. [5] [6]
Past fellows include United States Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy (1998 Fellow), Iranian-American Ebola researcher Pardis Sabeti (2001 Fellow) and Fei-Fei Li (1999 Fellow), a Stanford professor and artificial intelligence expert. [7]
The fellowship has no restrictions based on field of study, and has supported graduate students in public policy, science, medicine, business, law, music, arts, humanities, and the social sciences. Applicants can be pursuing master's degrees, doctorate's, JD, MD, MD/PhD or other joint degrees. [8]
The Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans supports up to two years of graduate study in any field at any advanced degree-granting program in the United States. Each fellow receives up to $25,000 a year in stipend support and up to $20,000 per year tuition support, allowing Fellows to receive as much as $90,000 over two years. [1] [9] Fellows attend two fall conferences in New York City designed to introduce the fellows to one another and to examine their experiences. [10]
The fellowship looks for applicants who have:
New American status: If an applicant was born abroad as a non-U.S. citizen, then they must have been naturalized, be a green card holder, be adopted, or be a DACA recipient. As of 2020, anyone, regardless of documentation, who was born abroad and graduated from both high school and college in the U.S. is eligible. For all applicants, regardless if they were born in the U.S. or abroad, the parents must have been born abroad as non-U.S. citizens unless the applicant grew up in a single-parent home.
Academic standing: To be eligible, applicants must be entering graduate school or in the first two years of graduate school as of the application deadline. If a student is a PhD student, the fellowship considers the master's part of the PhD. Fellows must be enrolled in full-time graduate studies during the first year of the fellowship.
Age: Applicants cannot have reached or passed their 31st birthday as of the application deadline. The fellowship makes no exceptions. [10]
As of 2022, 743 students have been recipients of The Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans. [10] The following institutions have had 30 or more fellows among their graduate student ranks. [11]
Institution | Fellows (1998-2022) |
---|---|
Harvard University | 309 |
Yale University | 112 |
Stanford University | 95 |
Massachusetts Institute of Technology | 36 |
Columbia University | 33 |
University of California, Berkeley | 30 |
Some notable fellows include:
Amy Yuen Yee Chow is an American former artistic gymnast who competed at the 1996 and 2000 Summer Olympics. She is best known for being a member of the Magnificent Seven, which won the United States' first team gold medal in Olympic gymnastics. She is also the first Asian-American woman to win an Olympic medal in gymnastics.
Pardis Christine Sabeti is an American computational biologist, medical geneticist, and evolutionary geneticist. She is a professor in the Center for Systems Biology and Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University, professor of Immunology and Infectious Disease at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, core institute member at the Broad Institute, and an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
Kao Kalia Yang is a Hmong American writer and author of The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir from Coffee House Press and The Song Poet from Metropolitan Press. Her work has appeared in the Paj Ntaub Voice Hmong literary journal, "Waterstone~Review," and other publications. She is a contributing writer to On Being's Public Theology Reimagined blog. Additionally, Yang wrote the lyric documentary, The Place Where We Were Born. Yang currently resides in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Julissa Reynoso Pantaleón is a Dominican Republic-born American attorney and diplomat who served as the United States Ambassador to Spain and Andorra from 2022 to 2024. Prior to her service as ambassador she was the chief of staff to First Lady Jill Biden. She formerly served as a litigation and international arbitration partner with the international law firm Winston & Strawn LLP. She was previously a partner with Chadbourne & Parke LLP, practicing in the firm's International Arbitration and Latin America groups. Reynoso is also affiliated with the faculty at Columbia University School of Law and the School of International and Public Affairs. From March 2012 until December 2014, she served as United States Ambassador to Uruguay. She is a former deputy assistant secretary for the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs at the United States Department of State. President Biden nominated her to be the next United States Ambassador to Spain on July 27, 2021, being confirmed on December 18, 2021.
Eric Liang Feigl-Ding is an American public health scientist who is currently an epidemiologist and Chief of COVID Task Force at the New England Complex Systems Institute. He was formerly a faculty member and researcher at Harvard Medical School and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He is also the Chief Health Economist for Microclinic International, and co-founder of the World Health Network. His research and advocacy have primarily focused on obesity, nutrition, cancer prevention, and biosecurity.
Paul Soros was a Hungarian-born American mechanical engineer, inventor, businessman and philanthropist. Soros founded Soros Associates, which designs and develops bulk handling and port facilities. Soros Associates currently operates in ninety-one countries worldwide, as of 2013. Paul Soros, often called "the invisible Soros", was the older brother of George Soros, a businessman and financier.
Vivek Hallegere Murthy is a British-American physician and a vice admiral in the United States Public Health Service Commissioned Corps who has served as the 19th and 21st surgeon general of the United States under Presidents Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden. Murthy is the first surgeon general of Indian descent, and, during his first term as surgeon general, he was the youngest active duty flag officer in federal uniformed service.
Fei-Fei Li is a Chinese-American computer scientist, known for establishing ImageNet, the dataset that enabled rapid advances in computer vision in the 2010s. She is the Sequoia Capital professor of computer science at Stanford University and former board director at Twitter. Li is a co-director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence and a co-director of the Stanford Vision and Learning Lab. She served as the director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory from 2013 to 2018.
Daisy Margaret Soros is an American philanthropist and supporter of the arts. She is the chairperson of the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans, a fellowship program that supports two years of graduate studies for 30 new Americans each year. She was married to the late Paul Soros, founder of Soros Associates and older brother of financier George Soros.
Nadine Burke Harris is a Canadian-American pediatrician who was the Surgeon General of California between 2019 and 2022; she is the first person appointed to that position. She is known for linking adverse childhood experiences and toxic stress with harmful effects to health later in life. Hailed as a pioneer in the treatment of toxic stress, she is an advisory council member for the Clinton Foundation's "Too Small to Fail" campaign, and the founder and former chief executive officer of the Center for Youth Wellness. Her work was also featured in Paul Tough's book How Children Succeed.
Vivek Ganapathy Ramaswamy is an American entrepreneur. He founded Roivant Sciences, a pharmaceutical company, in 2014. In February 2023, Ramaswamy declared his candidacy for the Republican Party nomination in the 2024 United States presidential election. He suspended his campaign in January 2024, after finishing fourth in the Iowa caucuses and endorsed Trump. On November 12, 2024, President-elect Donald Trump announced that Ramaswamy and businessman Elon Musk had been tasked to lead the newly proposed Department of Government Efficiency.
The Thomas J. Watson Foundation is a charitable trust formed 1961 in honor of former chairman and CEO of IBM, Thomas J. Watson. The Foundation's stated vision is to empower students “to expand their vision, test and develop their potential, and gain confidence and perspective to do so for others.” The Watson Foundation operates two programs, the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship and the Jeannette K. Watson Fellowship.
Lawrence Irving Wilde, is a composer, educator, violinist, and nyckelharpa player. Wilde has been commissioned by and collaborated with ensembles such as the Kronos Quartet, Eighth Blackbird, JACK Quartet, ÆON Music Ensemble, Sō Percussion, Tesla Quartet, Aspen Music Festival Orchestra, Moscow String Quartet, Ensemble Mise-En, Juilliard Orchestra, and others.
Cecilia Ballí is an American journalist and anthropologist who writes about the borderlands of Texas, security and immigration. She is a writer-at-large for Texas Monthly, and has been published in Harper’s Magazine and The New York Times Magazine as an independent journalist. She has been an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin and was a staff writer at the San Antonio Express-News from 1998 to 2000.
Maryana Iskander is an Egyptian-born American social entrepreneur and lawyer. In 2022, she became the chief executive officer (CEO) of the Wikimedia Foundation, succeeding Katherine Maher. Prior to her position, Iskander was the CEO of the Harambee Youth Employment Accelerator and a former chief operating officer of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America in New York.
Alice Chen is an American physician who is an assistant clinical professor at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. She has previously been a Hauser Visiting Leader at Harvard Kennedy School Center for Public Leadership and assistant clinical professor position at the George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Chen was a founding member and former director of the nonprofit organization Doctors for America.
Mehret Mandefro is an Ethiopian–American film/television producer, writer, physician and anthropologist. She is the group leader of the Indaba Africa, a co-founder of Realness Institute and co-founder of Truth Aid Media and is a board member of advisors for the shared Harvest Fund. She is also a recipient of The Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans (2001) and in 2007 sat as one of the 41 distinguished New American panelists. In 2016, she was honoured by Carnegie Corporation of New York as one of America's Great Immigrants.
Anthony Veasna So was an American writer. His short stories were described by The New York Times as "crackling, kinetic and darkly comedic" and often drew from his upbringing as a child of Cambodian immigrants. So died from an accidental drug overdose in 2020, and his debut book, a short story collection entitled Afterparties, was published in 2021.
Oscar De Los Santos is an American politician. He is a Democratic member of the Arizona House of Representatives elected to represent District 11 in 2022.
Tarun Chhabra is an American lawyer and security analyst current serving as Senior Director for Technology and National Security at the United States National Security Council in the Biden administration.