Seven Stanford-affiliated scholars were recently named Paul and Daisy Soros Fellows, joining 23 other people in the fellowship’s 2016 cohort. The fellowship provides tuition and living expenses for immigrants and children of immigrants for up to $90,000 over two years and aims to award students who demonstrate creativity, drive and academic success. The awardees have the opportunity to study in any degree-granting graduate school in the United States.
The Stanford-affiliated awardees include Abubakar Abid, Binbin Chen, Sharada Jambulapati ’12, Zihao Jiang, Veronica Manzo, Jenna Nicholas and Suhas Rao. Each will be attending graduate school at Stanford starting in 2017 or have previously attended Stanford.
Abid, the son of two Pakistani immigrants, will utilize the fellowship in order to pursue his Ph.D. studies in electrical engineering at Stanford. Abid plans to build edible medical devices that monitor biomedical signals that will not only diagnose diseases but also supply patients with real-time feedback.
Chen, another awardee, is a Chinese immigrant who plans to use the fellowship to support his M.D. and Ph.D. studies at Stanford Medical School. Currently, he is developing bioinformatics tools that analyze patient responses to immunotherapy.
The fellowship will help Jambulapati, the daughter of Indian immigrants, continue her legal studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Sharada is passionate about civil rights and racial justice, and received the John Gardner Public Service Fellowship, which allowed her to work at the Southern Poverty Law Center in Alabama. She studied international relations in her time as a Stanford undergraduate.
Jiang, an immigrant from Shaoxing, China, will utilize the fellowship to support his Ph.D. studies in physics at Stanford. Currently Jiang is participating in the ATLAS experiment, operating the ATLAS detector and analyzing massive amounts of physics data produced at the Large Hadron Collider.
Manzo, the daughter of two Mexican immigrants, plans to use the fellowship towards her studies at Stanford Medical School. Last summer, she helped aid the development of preventive medicine programs at the Ravenswood Family Health Center in East Palo Alto. Currently, she is focusing on cancer biology and community health.
The fellowship will aid Nicholas in her studies at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Nicholas co-founded Phoenix Global Impact, a consulting firm aimed at supporting leaders in the field of impact investing. She also worked as a project manager for Divest-Invest Philanthropy and expanded the organization’s membership to more than 150 foundations.
Rao, the son of two Indian immigrants, will use the fellowship to fund his medical and doctoral studies at Stanford Medical School. Rao studied the three-dimensional structure of the genome, helping to create the highest resolution maps of the 3D genome to date.
Contact Pascale Eenkema van Dijk at pevd ‘at’ stanford.edu.