The Fellowships intends to honor the new American excellence.
The Paul & Daisy Soros Fellows Association (PDSFA) has announced their 2017 Fellowships for New Americans and six Indian American students made to the list of 30 recipients.
The Fellowships intends to honor the new American excellence and is awarded to 30 outstanding immigrants and children of immigrants from all over the country and world who are pursuing graduate school in the United States.
This year’s list of fellows includes Indian Americans Ellora Israni, Pratyusha Kalluri, Sanjay Kishore, Shivani Radhakrishnan, Sanjena Sathian and Ashvin Anand Swaminathan.
Ellora Thandaney Israni, who was born and raised in Bay Area, is the daughter of Indian immigrants from Pune and studies law at Harvard. She earlier worked as a software engineer for Facebook and now a JD candidate at Harvard. She hopes to leverage the intersection of technology and law to change the way we define and deliver justice in the United States.
Stanford Computer science student Pratyusha Kalluri was born on the East Coast and raised in Madison, Wisconsin. Her parents moved to US from Andhra Pradesh in the 1980s. As an undergraduate at MIT and subsequently, a visiting researcher at the Complutense University of Madrid, Pratyusha built AI systems modelling facets of human intelligence and human language processing. She will pursue a PhD in computer science and aims to build AI that is more human like and understandable by synthesizing symbolic and statistical approaches.
Sanjay Kishore studies masters at Harvard Medical School and there he worked with fellow members of the Racial Justice Coalition to advocate for affordable health benefits for a union of over 700 Harvard dining workers. He is the youngest child of parents who emigrated from Hyderabad, and Sanjay was born and raised in rural Virginia. He aspires to use his clinical training to serve not just as an advocate for individual patients, but as the foundation for a career organizing for a more just society.
Shivani Radhakrishnan was born in Middletown, New York, to Indian parents from Bangalore and Baroda. She pursues PhD in philosophy at Columbia University and is interested in linguistic and social identity. Shivani studies philosophy’s role in social transformation and wants to promote reflective inquiry about the various aspects of our social and political lives that go unexamined.
Sanjena Anshu Sathian is from Bible Belt Georgia and studies MFA in creative writing at University of Iowa. She earned a BA in English from Yale University, where she served as editor-in-chief of the Globalist magazine. Her work engages Hindu and Buddhist philosophy, technology, diaspora and gender.
Princeton university Mathematics PhD student Ashvin Anand Swaminathan, who hails from New Providence, New Jersey, is a graduate in both mathematics and physics from Harvard. In his future career as a professor, he would like to work together with his students to develop a successful research program in number theory and hopes to realize his conviction that mathematics has the power to unify people of diverse backgrounds and interests under the common banner of seeking truth, depth, and wisdom in all their pursuits.
Selected from 1,775 applicants, each of the recipients was chosen for their potential to make significant contributions to the US society, culture, or their academic fields.
Each award is for up to $25,000 in stipend support, as well as 50 percent of required tuition and fees, up to $20,000 per year, for one to two years. The first year of Fellowship funding cannot be deferred.
The new Fellows will also join a strong community of current and past Fellows who all share the New American experience. The alumni association includes prominent Indian Americans such as former US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, Prabhjot Singh, Sachin Jain and Aarti Shahani among others.