Current Fellows
Spring 2009 Fellows
ASHISH AGRAWAL is pursuing a career as a physician/scientist and a clinical researcher. He is a first-year MD candidate at the University of California at San Francisco, where he is a Regents Scholar. He graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard in 2008 in biochemical sciences. At Harvard, he led and expanded two volunteer programs, one which provided support for low-income hospital patients and the other of which trained CPR and First Aid instructors. He founded a UCSF chapter of Crisis Health Initiative to sponsor American public health study for physicians from developing countries. He has extensive research experience at Harvard and UCSF, and recent work at the Gladstone Institute at UCSF netted him co-authorship of several papers, abstracts, and his name on two patent applications. Now 22, he was born in the US to Indian immigrants who continue to send money to family in India for their schooling; a practice he contends introduced him to the ethic of service. His parents are naturalized citizens, and his mother resides in Fremont, CA.
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CHITRA AKILESWARAN intends to combine her knowledge of medicine, global health and business practices to provide effective health financing options in the world's poorest areas. Currently a third-year student at Harvard Medical School, she will begin a combined program with Harvard Business School in September. She received a BA in Community Health, magna cum laude, from Brown University, where she also got her start undertaking community-based work on global health inequities. She has studied sexual violence and HIV among female migrants as a Fulbright Grantee to South Africa, traveled to the Dominican Republic to address the needs of Haitian batey communities, and most recently collaborated with a private bank in south India to create a maternity financing product for rural women. Now 26, she was born in Portland, OR to parents who emigrated from India and are naturalized citizens. They now live in Seattle, WA.
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RONALD WAKIM ALFA intends a career as a physician/scientist where his emphasis will be on applications alongside discovery. He is in his second year of the MSTP (Medical Science Training Program) at Stanford University, where he will receive both MD and PhD degrees. Now 28, he was born into a family of refugees from Lebanon. Beginning at a Los Angeles community college, he received his BSc, summa cum laude, in animal physiology and neurosciences from the University of California at San Diego; he also received an MA in History of Medicine from the University of London, where he was supported by the Wellcome Trust. A subsequent essay he wrote on the origins of the placebo effect received the William Osler Medal in 2008 by the American Association of the History of Medicine.
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CAREL ALÉ intends a career as a public prosecutor using prosecution as a tool for social change. Since receiving coterminous BA and MA in Latin American studies from UCLA, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and graduated magna cum laude, she is now a first year JD student at Yale Law School. At UCLA, she founded and was president of the university's Make-A-Wish Foundation chapter, organized volunteer tutors at Jordan High School in Watts and was active in the campus Darfur Action Committee. Carel's research and thesis focused on the philosophical and ideological underpinnings of the Mexican Revolution and its manifestations within the governance of the Partído Revolucionario Institucional. She has also done extensive work on Caribbean female migration. Carel interned at the California Lieutenant Governor's office and Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund where she headed a national research initiative addressing issues of higher education for undocumented students. Among other activities at Yale, she contributed to the writing of an amicus brief for a Louisiana death row inmate. Now 22, she was born in Mexico City to Mexican and Cuban parents and then moved to southern California when she was a young girl. Her family lives in Anaheim, CA.
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SA’ED ATSHAN is a joint doctoral candidate in anthropology and Middle Eastern studies at
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GENE MICHAEL BERDICHEVSKY intends to be part of the research and commercialization of technologies that will radically improve the world's energy resource use. Born in 1983 in Sevastopol, Ukraine he came to the US at age 9 via Murmansk and St. Petersburg. He received his bachelor's in engineering, with distinction, from Stanford University, where he, among many activities, participated in the Stanford Solar Car Project. The student designed vehicle completed a 2,300 mile race between Chicago and Los Angeles. In 2004 he joined Tesla Motors, a start-up electric car company, to develop the battery system, eventually serving as technical lead. When Tesla Roadster successfully launched into mass production, he returned to an interdisciplinary engineering master's at Stanford. He and his parents are naturalized citizens; his parents reside in Richmond, VA.
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SAVA BERHANÉ sees her future at the intersection of law and business in the field of economic development; to this end she will be a first year JD student at Yale University this fall. Attending Mount Holyoke College, from which she graduated with honors, she majored in Politics and served as president of her class and co-chair of the campus black student organization. She was also named a John Kenneth Galbraith Scholar of Inequality and Social Policy by the Harvard Kennedy School and Ford Foundation Research Scholar. Sava’s advocacy focuses on socio-economic issues, and she later coordinated financial literacy workshops in Boston. After graduation, she worked for the Obama campaign, eventually becoming statewide field director for the Alabama operation. Sava was born to parents who emigrated from Ethiopia and are now naturalized citizens. Her family resides in Cambridge, MA.
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TARUN CHHABRA aspires to work for the US government in the areas of foreign and national security policy. He is a first year JD candidate at Harvard Law School and a DPhil candidate in international relations at Oxford. He earned a BA, with honors and distinction, in international relations and Russian language and literature, and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. A Fulbright Scholar to Russia, he studied Russian perspectives on US foreign policy at the Moscow State Institute for International Relations (MGIMO). He later received a Marshall Scholarship to study at Merton College, Oxford, where he received a MPhil in international relations and won a Clarendon Award. Tarun worked on the staff of UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan's High-level Panel for UN reform and in the Executive Office of the Secretary-General. He later served as a consultant-advisor to the Norwegian Foreign Ministry on its nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament initiatives. Now 28, he was born in the US to parents who emigrated from India and are now naturalized citizens. They reside in Shreveport, Louisiana.
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MICHAEL CHIU intends to pursue a career as a physician/global health advocate, improving the quality of care provided to the underprivileged. He is a first-year MD student at Stanford Medical School. A graduate of Harvard University, he earned an AB in biology, magna cum laude, in 2005. Prior to medical school, he worked in China for three years, first with the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center and subsequently with the China Development Bank. Funded by two Harvard public service fellowships, he created several health care initiatives including an early HIV detection program for infants. In college, his activities ranged from editing the Harvard Crimson to mobilizing the Asian-American community. He directed the Chinatown Citizenship Program, where Harvard student-tutors prepared immigrants for the US citizenship exam. Now 25, he was born in La Jolla, CA. His parents emigrated from Taiwan and Hong Kong. They are now naturalized citizens and reside in Cambridge, MA.
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DANIA DAYE will pursue a career as a physician-scientist-engineer. A graduate of Rice University, she majored in bioengineering and graduated magna cum laude with election to Phi Beta Kappa. Now a second-year candidate at the University of Pennsylvania's MD/PhD program, she is pursuing bioengineering for her PhD with an emphasis on imaging sciences. She is a Howard Hughes Fellow. Born 23 years ago in Beirut, Lebanon, she came to the US when she was sixteen. Her parents, both naturalized citizens, reside in Orlando, FL. At Rice she was active as EMS Operations Lieutenant, where she supervised twenty-two EMT's and secured for the campus the donation of 20 defibrillators. She is currently working on a patent for a technique she developed for non-invasive quantification of hepatic collagen concentration in liver fibrosis.
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ADEL ELSOHLY intends a career in drug discovery and development, where his research will focus on chemotherapeutic agents. To that end, he is a second-year PhD candidate in chemistry at Columbia University as a National Science Foundation Pre-doctoral Fellow. He completed his BS in pharmaceutical sciences and mathematics with election to Phi Beta Kappa and his MS in chemistry at the University of Mississippi. He held the Barry M. Goldwater scholarship. Based on his research during college and later at Columbia, he has first-author publications in the Journal of American Chemical Society and the International Journal of Quantum Chemistry. At both the University of Mississippi and Columbia, he has been an active member of the Muslim-American community. Now 25, he was born in Oxford, MS, the child of parents who emigrated from Egypt, are now naturalized citizens and live in Oxford, MS.
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AYIRINI FONSECA-SABUNE believes that effective education reform must be based in the courtroom as well as the classroom. Therefore, she will be attending Harvard Law School next year. Now 26, she was born in the US to a family where her father emigrated from Uganda and her mother from Guyana. Her parents, both naturalized citizens, live in Dobbs Ferry, NY. As an undergraduate at Harvard University, where she received her BA cum laude, with high honors in social studies, she served as president of Phillips Brooks House Association, a student run nonprofit public service organization. After graduation, she worked with incarcerated women on Rikers Island, NY and with the NYC Civilian Complaint Review Board investigating police misconduct. After a year teaching in Uganda as a Rockefeller Fellow, she spent two years as a member of the New York City Teaching Fellows program, where she taught twelfth grade in Brooklyn. She is now supporting the community health training program in a rural district of Rwanda with Partners in Health.
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SHANTANU GAUR plans a career as a physician-scientist, translating his work from bench to bedside. Completing his BS in biology from Harvard University, where he graduated summa cum laude with election to Phi Beta Kappa, he is now a first-year medical student at Harvard Medical School. As a sophomore in college, he co-authored a paper in Human Molecular Genetics and recently cracked a major problem in the field of cell biology, earning a first-authorship in an article submitted to Nature. In addition to his studies, he made time to co-found the Harvard Online Pharmacy Project; to found the Harvard Undergraduate Research Symposium, and to jump-start the Harvard Cricket Club. Now 22, he was raised by Indian immigrants to Canada and later western Pennsylvania. He and his family are naturalized US citizens, residing in Canonsburg, PA.
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ANJA HAVEDAL intends a career supporting the rule of law in developing countries. Now a first-year JD candidate at Columbia Law School, she earned a BA in East and Central European studies from Lund University (Sweden) in 2002, having spent several semesters at the University of California at Berkeley and Jagiellonian University in Krakow (Poland). Before law school, Anja worked for two years as a senior editor at the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit in Kabul, editing and overseeing the production of 25 publications a year. She also spent four years at the National Endowment for Democracy in Washington, D.C., serving as associate editor of the Journal of Democracy. Now 29, she grew up in Sweden and came to the US in 2001. She holds a green card.
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MARIBEL HERNÁNDEZ is preparing herself for a career in immigration law and advocacy. To that end, she is doing a joint JD/MPA at New York University and the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton. She is at present an articles editor of the NYU Law Review and a member of the Immigrant Rights Clinic. Born in Mexico 28 years ago, she and her family came to Texas when she was 13. Majoring in Social Studies, she graduated magna cum from Harvard University, where she held a Mellon Mays undergraduate fellowship and a Goldman Sachs scholarship for excellence. At Harvard, she was active in addressing issues of importance to Latino/a students, serving as president of the local chapter of RAZA and Concilio Latino. After graduation she taught in Marseilles, France and later interned with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in Mozambique and the Clinton Foundation. Her family members are naturalized citizens and reside in Houston, TX.
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ANDRES IDARRAGA intends to work in the education field as a litigator, researcher or advocate, with a special interest in education equality. He is a first-year JD candidate at Yale Law School. A graduate of Brown University, he received an AB in economics and comparative literature and was a Mellon Mays Undergraduate fellow. He was born in Medellin, Colombia and joined his father in Pawtucket, RI when he was 8. While at Brown, he worked on the Rhode Island Right to Vote campaign, which focused on ending felony disenfranchisement in Rhode Island. The campaign, which partnered with the Brennan Center at New York University and the American Civil Liberties Union, was successful. At Yale, he organized a debate on successes and failures of the charter school movement and on the nascent incentive based programs that pay students for performance on standardized tests. He is also writing an essay for a book called Latino Men to Latino Young Men, which is in contract to be published.
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ALEXANDRU IFTIMIE intends a career in international law and public affairs, hoping to move US law in an internationalist direction. After a BA in international relations at the University of Southern California, graduating summa cum laude with election to Phi Beta Kappa, he is now a first-year JD candidate at the Yale Law School. While growing up in Romania and listening to Radio Free Europe's "Youth Reports" he became convinced of the importance of debate to civil society. In high school and college in the US, he served on and captained debate teams, as well as serving as a coach and judge. Before entering law school, he worked on the Obama campaign, first as a field organizer in Nevada and Arizona, then as an early vote director and finally as the campaign's get-out-the-vote director in Nebraska. Originally from Romania, he came to the US when he was 12. Now 24, he is now a naturalized citizen and his family resides Laguna Niguel, CA.
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JANINE JOSEPH is developing a career as a poet and teacher. To this end, she is a first-year PhD candidate in literature and creative writing at the University of Houston. This program follows her MFA in poetry from New York University and her BA in creative writing, summa cum laude with upper division honors, from the University of California at Riverside. A Kundiman fellow, her poems have appeared in such journals and anthologies as Third Coast, Spoon River Poetry Review, Nimrod International Journal, Fugue, Calabash, and Breathe: 101 Contemporary Odes, among others. She is currently working on a larger book-length project, presently titled Human Archipelago, which focuses on the often untold experiences of undocumented immigrants. Now 26, she was born in Metro Manila, Philippines and came to the US with her family when she was eight. She is a green card holder.
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SINA KIAN anticipates a career working for the Department of Justice, with an eye toward the Solicitor General's Office. For now, he is a second-year JD candidate at Stanford Law School. He recently published an article challenging the scholarly consensus surrounding key 11th Amendment cases. Now 23, he was born in Iran in the midst of the Iran-Iraq war; his family immigrated to the US where they all became naturalized citizens. As an undergraduate in history at the University of Virginia, he received the Dabney prize for the outstanding thesis in U.S. History. While there, he co-founded a think tank to publish policy papers, wrote a weekly column for the Cavalier Daily, and chaired a student group that raised over $25,000 for Parkinson's disease research. He is currently Senior Articles Editor of the Stanford Law Review. His varied interests include backpacking, the environment, fiction, writing, and digital photography.
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HANA LEE plans a career as a researcher in molecular and cell biology. To that end, having first received her bachelor's with High Honors in biochemical sciences from Harvard University, she is now a second-year PhD student in molecular and cell biology at the University of California at Berkeley. Now 23, she was born in Korea. She and her family are naturalized citizens; they reside in Rego Park, NY. Her interests range widely from blogging on literature to kendo. She has situated her research at the intersection of several fields, including genetics, genomics, cell biology, engineering, and statistics, and she is interested in the design principles that optimize biological systems to survive in their environments.
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SINA KEVIN NAZEMI sees a career for himself in easing world inequalities through business and technical developments. To help prepare for this, he is in the first year of a three-year joint MBA/MPP program offered by the Kennedy School of Government and the Harvard Business School. He completed his undergraduate work at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and went from there for five years to Microsoft Corporation. He began as an Associate Product Marketing Manager, won seven promotions in four years, and became -- as Director of US Channel, Microsoft Dynamics Customer Relationship Management - the youngest director at Microsoft. At MIT, he was a class president and spoke at commencement. He also served as Head Senate Page in Washington. Now 27, he was born in Tehran, Iran and came to the US with his parents when he was five. They are all naturalized citizens; his parents live near Seattle, WA.
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MARIANNA OFOSU expects to make her career in law and public policy focused on economic development in developing countries. To that end, she will be attending Yale Law School in the fall. She received her BA in classics from Howard University, where she graduated summa cum laude with election as a junior to Phi Beta Kappa. As a Rhodes Scholar, she earned an MPhil in development studies at Oxford University. Since graduating, she has been working with government leaders in West Africa on private sector development and economic policy issues: as a managing director of GoodWorks International Ghana; as an organizer of the 7th Annual Leon H. Sullivan Summit in Nigeria; and at present, as chief of staff for the African Center for Economic Transformation, a nonprofit economic policy research and advisory organization. Now 28, she was born in Poland to a Polish mother and Ghanaian father. She came to America at 11 and is now a naturalized citizen. Her family resides in San Antonio, TX.
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EDWARD PHAM plans a career as a clinician educator and a biomedical researcher. Towards that end, he received his undergraduate degree in bioengineering from UCLA, where he graduated summa cum laude, top of his class, with election to both Phi Beta Kappa and Tau Beta Pi. He attended UCLA on a Gates Millennium scholarship. Having conducted research on targeted cancer drug delivery since his freshman year, he has co-authored two publications and a pending patent. In his senior year, he also developed a laboratory tumor model that more closely resembles real tumors which allows for more efficient cancer therapeutics screening. The research team is now preparing two other publications and patents. He is currently a first-year MD candidate at Stanford University. Now 23, he came to the US from Vietnam with his family at age 16. They are naturalized citizens and live in Orange County, CA.
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SHARMEEN PREMJEE sees for herself a career in urban youth development. To that end, looking for additional skills to add to her existing six years of experience, she will be attending Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public Affairs in the fall. Graduating from Yale University in 2002 with distinction in two majors, she was honored at graduation for her profound social and academic contributions to the Yale/New Haven community. She attended Yale as a Gates Millennium Scholar. On a Fulbright, she did a certificate at the School of Oriental And African Studies in London. Since graduation she has worked with Human Rights Watch, the Los Angeles chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility and since 2006 in the Los Angeles Mayor's office in an effort to reduce gang participation and warfare in the City. Now 28, she was born in Southern California to parents who emigrated from Pakistan and are now naturalized citizens. They reside in Birmingham, AL.
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YANIV SEGAL intends a career as a musician and conductor. Already at Vassar College, where he earned his BA in music, he began to assemble musicians to play as an ensemble. After graduating from Vassar, Yaniv put the same skills to work creating a New York music cooperative, the Chelsea Symphony. By allowing members to train as soloists and conductors in exchange for playing regularly in the orchestra, the Chelsea Orchestra (now in its third full season) has managed to perform some twenty concerts per season, free of charge, at a consistently high level. Now, as a first-year MM candidate in orchestral conducting at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor he is continuing to pursue his goal. Yaniv is 27, born in New York to parents who emigrated from Poland and Israel. His parents are naturalized citizens and reside in Yonkers, NY.
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SUSHMA SHETH is a community organizer who in the fall will be attending Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management. A 2001 graduate of Brown University, where she concentrated in development studies, she is director of programs for the Miami Workers Center. There, she helps develop grassroots leaders as well as build coalitions around such issues as affordable housing and economic development. Since 2007, she has also been active in building a national coalition of similar organizations, Right to the City Alliance. Born in Miami and now 29, she is the daughter of immigrants from India. They are naturalized citizens and reside in Miami, FL.
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TOMASZ (TOMMY) STRYJEWSKI plans a career in medicine and public health with a focus on blindness. A first-year medical student at Harvard University, he completed his undergraduate degree in biological sciences at Louisiana State University. Among many forms of recognition, he was named to the All-USA College Academic First Team by USA Today. Now 23, he was born in Krakow, Poland and came with his family to the US when he was two. They are all naturalized citizens and the family resides in Baton Rouge, LA. Between spending summers in Poland and growing a deeper understanding of health disparities in Louisiana, he served as an Emergency First Responder and logged 952 hours, including working in hurricanes Ivan, Katrina, and Rita. He also served in a leprosy hospital and several years in an organization recovering corneas for transplantation.
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ROBERTO VALLADARES plans to have a career in academic surgery. To prepare for this, he is a first-year medical student at Stanford University. He received a BS summa cum laude in chemistry and biology from Westmont College. He began his educational career as an auto mechanic, taking community college classes on the side. These courses led him to Westmont College, where his passion for medicine and scientific research grew. Teaching, research producing publications, and help in editing a textbook in general chemistry were his experiences there. He also served as a translator for a free clinic in Westminster, CA and in a cataract surgery clinic in Mexico. Now 24, he was born in Santa Monica, CA, to a family that had emigrated from Guatemala. His parents are naturalized citizens and reside in Simi Valley, CA.
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JANE VAYNMAN plans a career as a scholar and policy expert in the field of international politics. At Stanford University, she earned her BA with distinction in international relations and minored in Russian, East European, and Eurasian studies. She was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. After Stanford, she took a job at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, DC, where she contributed to a number of books and reports on nuclear security. Her work experience in DC also includes positions at the Center for American Progress and Center for Strategic and International Studies. Prior to her graduate studies, Jane worked at the Carnegie Moscow Center as a Fulbright Fellow and conducted independent research on Russian nonproliferation policy. In 2008, she contributed to the foreign policy advisory group for the Barack Obama presidential campaign. Jane is a second-year PhD student in government at Harvard University. She was born in Kiev, Ukraine and immigrated to the US with her family in 1989. She and her parents are naturalized US citizens; her family resides in Foster City, CA.
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PREVIN WARREN plans a career in legal scholarship. Preparing for that aspiration, he is in his first year at Harvard Law School. As an undergraduate at Harvard, he majored in social studies, graduating magna cum laude, earning election to Phi Beta Kappa, and receiving a Robert C. Byrd Honors Scholarship. His honors thesis on the philosophy of Habermas and Peirce received the prestigious Thomas Temple Hoopes Prize. While an undergraduate, he co-founded a student advocacy group championing progressive causes and co-edited a book about youth civic engagement after 9/11. Since graduating, he has worked with indigent criminal defendants while at the Federal Defenders and articulated economic development and poverty policy as an adviser with the Mayor's Office in New York City. For five years, he played bass guitar in a Brooklyn-based rock trio, The States. Now 26, he was born in California to parents who emigrated from India. Both parents are naturalized US citizens and they reside in Huntington Beach, CA.
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RISHENG XU is a second-year MD/PhD student at Johns Hopkins, where he received the Franklin Paine Mall Award for the highest academic standing last year. He helped found and coordinate the volunteer division of Johns Hopkins' Emergency Department HIV Counseling Program, which screened more than 8,000 patients last year. He completed his bachelor's, magna cum laude, and master's in chemistry at Harvard University, and has published ten articles, a number of them first-authored, within such journals as Organic Letters, the Journal of the American Chemical Society, the Journal of Neurosurgery, and Neurosurgery. While he hopes to pursue academic medicine, his other interests have led to his work as a news executive for The Harvard Crimson, his commitment as a five-semester teaching fellow and election as an Award Peer Tutor, as well as his piano performances as a winner of national and international piano competitions during high school. Born in China and now 23, he joined his parents in the US in 1989. They are naturalized citizens and reside in Houston, TX.
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