Five Yale-affiliated New Americans win Soros Fellowships for graduate study

As an 8-year-old newly gotten here immigrant from Seoul, South Korea, Eric Hoyeon Song didn’t speak English when he initially went to school in Buena Vista, California. Making the foreign experience much more alien, he initially entered his class to see everyone dressed strangely. It was Halloween.
Tune is one of two Yale M.D./ Ph.D. candidates who are among the 30 graduate students nationwide granted Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans, which are provided to immigrants and children of immigrants to support their graduate education. The other Yale trainee, Stefano Giovanni Daniele, was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, to Italian immigrants.
Also bestowed the fellowships are three alumni: Adrienne Minh-Châu Lê ’14, a doctoral student at Columbia University; Saul Ramirez ’19 J.D., a Ph.D. prospect at Harvard University; and Wendy Sun ’18, an M.D./ Ph.D. trainee at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Chosen from a swimming pool of 2,211 candidates, a record-breaking number, the fellows were selected for their potential to make considerable contributions to the United States. They will each receive approximately $90,000 in financing over 2 years to support their graduate studies. The 2020 Paul and Daisy Soros Fellows are the kids of immigrants, permit holders, naturalized residents, Deferred Action for Youth Arrival (DACA) recipients, or visa holders who finished from both high school and college in the United States.
” At a time when all kinds of migration are under attack, it’s more crucial than ever to be celebrating the achievements and contributions of immigrants and refugees from across the world,” said Craig Harwood, who directs the fellowship program. “Our country and universities are enhanced by the ingenuity that originates from abroad. When we honor and invest in New Americans our country is more powerful– the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellows are a best presentation of that.”
The fellowship program was established by Hungarian immigrants Daisy M. Soros and her late spouse, Paul Soros (1926-2013) to honor continuing generations of immigrant contributions to the United States.
Stefano Daniele
Daniele’s parents came to the United States from the agricultural town of Bracigliano, Italy. Growing up, Daniele helped his moms and dads develop financial security in their brand-new country by filling freight trucks in his father’s warehouse and offering handcrafted present baskets with his mother at local fairs.
At Georgetown University, he was encouraged to study the brain after experiencing his mom’s struggles with anxiety and his grandma’s Parkinson’s disease. He looked into Parkinson’s under the mentorship of Kathleen Maguire-Zeiss, teacher in Georgetown’s Department of Neuroscience, and was picked as an undergraduate Howard Hughes Research study Scholar before being granted the Quality in Research Study Prize for his senior thesis. He likewise won the Taylor-Weber Scholarship for the greatest level of academic achievement in the biology department.
After making his B.S. in neurobiology, Daniele performed full-time research in Maguire-Zeiss’ laboratory, publishing his deal with how immune cells of the brain become activated in Parkinson’s.
At Yale, his doctoral work under the mentorship of Professor Nenad Sestan is centered on establishing the BrainEx technology and examining its ability to bring back circulation and cellular function in the brain numerous hours after death. His Ph.D. remains in neuroscience. His work has revealed that the brain has an underappreciated strength to prolonged disruptions of blood flow, preparing for future improvements in stroke and heart attack research study. He is the National Italian-American Foundation Giargiari Medical Scholar, a cofounder of the Harvey Cushing Neurological Society, and a member of the 2020 Forbes 30 Under 30 in the science classification.
” To me, being a New American methods having the unique capability of selecting the very best parts of your or your family’s immigration story and difficulties and using them to the chances just offered in the United States to develop something truly unique and useful to society,” Daniele told The Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship program.
Eric Song
Song said he remembers his early days at school in the United States whenever he navigates new obstacles and environments. His parents dealt with monetary, emotional, and psychological obstacles as they were accustoming to life in their brand-new nation. He cofounded a not-for-profit organization called Task L in assistance of his goal of providing kids with better opportunities, and operated at Teach for America as a school project organizer during his time at the University of Southern California (USC). After earning his biochemistry degree from USC, he earned a master’s degree at The Johns Hopkins University, performing research study on enhancing gene shipment techniques that might help brain growth and cystic fibrosis patients.
Working with his Ph.D. coach Professor Akiko Iwasaki, he recognized a key restricting element in invoking an immune action against brain tumors, a research study that was released in the journal Nature. He wants to continue working on translational research that can one day offer new therapies for clients.
” The determination to welcome the new, the unusual, and the in-need is noticeably (New) American to me,” said Tune. “This implies structure off of not only my past experiences, however my neighborhoods’ effort and effort in developing an area where new individuals from all backgrounds can join and feel welcomed. I will always live with this in mind and hope to achieve work that will show the significance of individuals and community in producing place for future generations of New Americans.”
Adrienne Lê
Lê is the child of Vietnamese refugees who got away Saigon in the after-effects of the Vietnam War. Her parents met in the United States and settled down in residential area of Raleigh, North Carolina. Lê said she came to comprehend her heritage and identity through Buddhism, a religious custom that taught her to accept the complex history of her family.
In her scholarly work, Lê looks for to additional understanding of the past in order to assist heal the wounds of the Vietnam War. She is pursuing a Ph.D. in history at Columbia University with a focus on civil society during the war, anti-colonial motions, and international migration. Her argumentation will narrate of the Vietnamese Buddhist anti-war motion.
At Yale, Lê got a B.A. in history and was granted a department reward for her thesis on how Vietnamese women formed and responded to changing ideas of womanhood, morality, and patriotism during the French colonial age. Before beginning her doctoral research studies, she worked for four years as a digital advocate and not-for-profit method expert in New york city City, teaming up with a range of companies concentrated on refugee resettlement, females’s rights, gun reform, creative innovation, and civi
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