PD Soros Fellowships for New Americans

Log In

If you are an applicant and need to sign into the online application, you can find the link on the "Apply" page of our website: Apply Page.

If you are a fellow looking to login, please note that we are currently updating our backend system for managing Fellow data. In the meantime, to update your information for the Fellowship, please send updates to Nikka Landau at nlandau@pdsoros.org.

The Summer Awaits: How Recent Paul & Daisy Soros Fellows Are Spending Their Summers

05.31.19

Back to News & Events

The summer months can be a time for graduate school students to dive deeper into their field, but it can also be a time for them to return home, visit with family, or try something brand new. With Paul & Daisy Soros Fellows studying a wide range of fields—medicine, physics, law, history, business, music—and coming from all over the country and world, we wanted to find out how they are spending their summers.

Banner photo: 2017 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow Ivan Forde infront of his studio in Italy at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, 2019.

Early this year, Northwestern University JD/MBA student Benjamin Chou co-founded a startup, Stuart’s, with a team of his fellow MBA students at the Kellogg School of Management. Stuart’s works with apartment buildings to provide a new tenant amenity: premium barbers and hair stylists so tenants don’t have to leave their building. This summer, Ben will be working on the startup fulltime. Curious to see Stuart’s work? Visit their Instagram here. As for fun, Ben will be taking a road trip with his parents through northern New England and southern Canada.

Harvard University physics PhD student Iris Cong has been primarily focused on theoretical physics, however this summer she will begin working on a couple experimental projects with her research group. Iris will also be attending a month-long summer school in Les Houches, France on quantum many-body systems. “Many of the lecturers at this summer school are pioneers in my research field,” Iris writes. “I am very excited to gain key background knowledge and form important connections with both the experts and young researchers in my research area. I'm also really looking forward to hiking in the Alps, of course!”

Woong Hwang has a very special trip home to Seattle, Washington planned this summer. Woong’s family will be welcoming his grandmother, who lives in South Korea, to the United States for her 90th birthday!

Most of Woong’s summer will be spent in a lab in New Haven, Connecticut where he is an MD/PhD student studying genetics at Yale University. His research focuses on understanding the nuclear transport pathway of a key protein in Wnt signaling. Given that many cancers, such as colon cancer, are caused by Wnt abnormalities, according to Woong, understanding the pathway is critical. Woong plans to present his research at the national Wnt Signaling Gordon Research Conference in August.

Nancy Ko will be starting her PhD in history this fall at Columbia University. This summer, she’ll be a teaching assistant for Professor Jay Harris's course "The Ethics of Identity" at Harvard Summer School in Venice, Italy. Nancy explained that the course “explores questions of personal and group identity that are organized around Kwame Anthony Appiah's The Ethics of Identity, in conversation with his predecessors, interlocutors, and opponents.” Nancy, who grew up in Brooklyn, will also be visiting family in Jeju and Seoul, South Korea for the first time since high school.

Citizen science has taken Jonathan Marquez’s summer by storm. “I am helping to record sizes and activities of local frog populations in New Haven as part of Frog Watch USA, thanks to training held by this organization in collaboration with the Peabody Museum at Yale University,” Jonathan explains. “This project gives scientists an idea of how different frog species populations are changing over time across the nation with participants ranging from individual to families with children interested in science going out to local areas to listen for frog calls. This provides important insights into broader environmental changes since amphibians such as frogs are often thought of as indicator species that tell us about even small changes in their environment before other changes become visible.”

Yale Law School student Aseem Mehta will be working as a summer law clerk at the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice where he’ll be focused on labor organizing, immigration representation, and economic justice litigation. In addition, in June, as part of his work with the Yale Law School Worker and Immigrant Rights Advocacy Clinic, Aseem will be leading the oral argument in federal district court in Massachusetts in a case challenging the law enabling prolonged incarceration of immigrants. He’ll be visiting his parents in Boston and his sister in Toronto this summer.

Former teacher Samir Paul will be working for the Center for Public Research and Leadership at Columbia Law School where he is currently a student. The Center acts as a non-profit consulting firm that supports organizations in the education sector. Samir will also be working as a research assistant for Elizabeth Scott, whose work is focused on juvenile criminal law. Outside of work and research, Samir will be visiting his nephews and hosting an annual family potluck known as the “Feast,” which he describes “Like a wedding or a funeral, except you can actually enjoy it and it happens every year.”

Writer Natalia Reyes graduated from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop MFA program at the University of Iowa in the spring and will be staying in Iowa City for another year to teach advanced creative writing to English majors at the University as a Postgraduate Visiting Writer Fellow in fiction. This summer, Natalia will be attending the Cuttyhunk Island Residency as a Paul Cuffee Scholar.

Natalia will be a Maat Scholar at the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley Writers Workshops, and a John Leggett Scholar in fiction at the Napa Valley Writers' Conference. For fun, she’ll be traveling to Mexico City to visit friends and explore the city.

One of the primary reasons Jennifer Shin chose to pursue a joint degree in architecture and forestry and environmental studies at Yale University was to pursue her interest in urban ecology and how urban systems are linked to ecological systems. This summer, Jennifer will be doing just that as she collects data on ecological restoration and design sites in the greater Baltimore area. The data, which will be in the form of drawings, photos, mapping, and graphic analysis, will serve as the foundation for an urban ecology primer for designers. Jennifer will also be being using the data to look at “how urban ecological systems are also linked to social ecological systems, and how design influences the success or failure of these systems.” Jennifer will be researching with ecologist Morgan Grove, the lead researcher at the US Forest Service Baltimore Field Station. Her work is being supported by the Hixon Center for Urban Ecology at Yale, which selected Jennifer as a Hixon Student Research Fellow.

Caltech planetary science PhD student Shreyas Vissapragada will be receiving his master’s in the field in June and then continuing his PhD research this summer. Shreyas will be commissioning and working with new instrumentation that, as he explains, may “allow us to see the upper atmospheres of extra-solar planets getting ripped off by high-energy radiation from their host stars.” He will spend the summer testing the instrumentation along with his lab mates, and they hope to have their first observations with the new technology on the night of August 15. In addition, Shreyas will be developing his search for a new molecule in Venus’s atmosphere.