P.D. Soros Fellowship for New Americans

KATARINA RUSCIC is currently the Director of Anesthesia for Plastic, Reconstructive and Breast Oncology Surgery at the Massachusetts General Hospital. She studied under the Medical Scientist Training Program at the University of Chicago, pursuing both an MD and a PhD in computational neuroscience. Her present doctoral research in a pediatrics cardiology lab focuses how the electrical activity of the heart generates each heart beat and how disruptions in this process can lead to arrhythmia.

Katarina was born in Zagreb, Croatia and became a naturalized US citizen at the age of 15.

Katarina graduated from the University of Chicago, where she was a Goldwater scholar and held Howard Hughes and PCBio Fellowships. She won the Illinois Chemical Education Foundation (ICEF) award and had three majors biology, chemistry and biochemistry, and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.

Katarina received the Knock prize for outstanding academic achievement in biological chemistry and presented her honors research thesis at an international meeting of the Biophysical Society. Her work on batteries for hybrid electric cars as an undergraduate at Argonne National Laboratory resulted in two patent applications and presentations at several international conferences. Katarina's career goals, however, focus on pediatric medicine.