The White House Fellows Program was created in 1964 by President Lyndon B Johnson.
Tina R Shah, a physician from the University of Chicago and Anjali Tripathi, an Astrophysics Ph.D candidate at Harvard University, have been selected for the prestigious White House Fellow program, The Indian Express reported.
The program offers firsthand experience of working at the highest levels of the US federal government and Indian Americans Tina and Anjali are among the 16 White House Fellows appointed from across the nation for the year 2016-17.
The White House Fellows will spend a year in Washington, DC working full-time for Cabinet Secretaries, senior White House staff, and other top-ranking government officials.
They will also participate in an education program consisting of round-table discussions with renowned leaders from the private and public sectors, including the President and Vice President.
Tina Shah is a Pulmonary and Critical Care physician-scientist focused on transforming healthcare delivery for patients with chronic diseases. She completed her clinical fellowship at the University of Chicago recently and she there she redesigned the care cycle for patients with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), dramatically reducing hospital readmissions.
Shah also led an inter-professional research team to evaluate this value-based care delivery program. Shah was a trustee for the Chicago Medical Society and has held leadership positions in other medical societies to advocate for her patients and for a sustainable medical workforce. She received a BS and an MD from the Pennsylvania State University/Jefferson Medical College accelerated six-year medical program and MPH from Harvard.
Tripathi, whose commitment to improving her community has been recognised by Harvard, MIT and the American Red Cross will receive her Ph.D from Harvard, where she earned an AM in Astronomy as an NSF Graduate Research Fellow. She received M.Phil in Astronomy from Cambridge University as a Marshall Scholar and SB in SB in Physics, with a minor in Applied International Studies, from MIT.
She focuses on the formation and evolution of planets and has pioneered the characterisation of planet forming environments and developed the first 3D simulations of planets evaporating due to extreme atmospheric heating.
Tripathi has also been involved in modelling the Milky Way and the search for dark matter. Previously, she has conducted particle physics, seismology and engineering research at Fermilab, Caltech, MIT, and NASA JPL, as part of the mission operations team for the Mars Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity.
The White House Fellows Program was created by President Lyndon B Johnson to give promising American leaders “first hand, high-level experience with the workings of the Federal government and to increase their sense of participation in national affairs” in 1964.
There are more than 700 white House Fellow alumni, a distinguished group that includes former Secretary of State Colin Powell, former Secretary of Labor Elanie Chao, former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Henry Cisneros, CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr Sanjay Gupta, and Pulitzer Prize-winning author and historian Doris Kearns Goodwin.
Fellowships are awarded on a strictly non-partisan basis.