P.D. Soros Fellowship for New Americans

When Roxana's parents immigrated to the United States from Tehran in the late 1970s, the Iranian Revolution was gaining momentum. Influenced by her father's love of science, Roxana went to the Texas Academy of Mathematics and Science and was named a Siemens Westinghouse Technology Competition Semifinalist.

Then she went on to Rice University, where, as a Goldwater Scholar, Roxana not only received a bioengineering degree, but also taught Sunday school at the Houston Baha'i center. In addition, she joined Rice's Beyond Traditional Borders, an interdisciplinary program where undergraduates seek solutions to the world's most pressing health problems. There she helped develop the diagnostic lab-in-a-backpack, a travel pack containing medical tools that could run on a solar-powered rechargeable battery.

Roxana is now an MD/PhD candidate at Stanford Medical School. Her work on anticoagulant sensitivity in African Americans was awarded a Howard Hughes Medical Fellowship, and she is the lead researcher on the Iranian Genomes Project, the first project to study Iranian ancestry through whole genome sequencing. Roxana is also an active member of Education Under Fire, a global campaign to protest the Iranian government's policy of expelling Baha'is from university.