Outstanding Immigrants: 6 Indian Americans Awarded Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans
Thirty exceptional immigrants and immigrant children are studying for graduate degrees in the United States.
This year’s class of Paul & Daisy Soros Fellows, which consists of thirty exceptional immigrants and immigrant children pursuing graduate studies in the US, includes six Indian Americans. Each of the recipients, who were chosen from over 2,300 applications, was picked because they each have the potential to significantly impact the United States. They will each get funding of up to $90,000 spread over two years. Recipients of the Fellowship have studied a variety of subjects, including business, law, medicine, and the arts, with more than $80 million in funding awarded since the programme’s founding 26 years ago.
Following are the Indian American fellows:
Currently pursuing an MD at Harvard Medical School, Shubhayu Bhattacharyay hopes to work as a physician-engineer in neurocritical or neurosurgical care. In order to safeguard patient safety and equity in the clinical deployment of decision support systems for TBI care, he is investigating the sources of bias in medical AI at Harvard. His goal is to use big data to improve TBI care’s accuracy and accessibility across the globe. Born in Kolkata, he lived his early years in Vietnam and Thailand before relocating to the South Bay of Los Angeles. His grandparents taught him the language and customs of his native Bengali language. His appreciation of his roots enabled him to recognise the common healthcare issues facing his Indian and Los Angeles communities and to value the cultural diversity of his neighbourhood, which is primarily made up of immigrants. At Johns Hopkins University, he double majored in biomedical engineering and applied mathematics and statistics with a minor in Spanish. He started Auditus Technologies, a company that creates accessible, individualised hearing aids for adults with dementia, while still in college. He was awarded a Gates Cambridge Scholarship in 2020 to study clinical neurosciences for his PhD. He helped launch an evidence-based programme for fostering psychological resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic while volunteering at Headway Cambridge and Peterborough, a nonprofit rehabilitation facility for people who have survived acquired brain injuries, while he was pursuing his graduate degree.
Born in Tirupati, Keerthana Hogirala moved to the US at the age of six, bringing her parents and younger brother with her. She learned not to take anything for granted from watching her parents struggle to maintain their immigration status through hard work and eventually earning citizenship. Her pursuit of neuroscience at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign was motivated by this, and she concentrated on social welfare, trauma-informed care, and child development. She also managed Volunteer Illini Projects, one of the largest national volunteer organisations managed by students employing students, and helped to expand neighbourhood non-profits that support impoverished communities. Following her graduation, she worked as an early childhood special education teacher at a Title 1 school in the District of Columbia Public Schools (DC Public Schools). She was appointed chief of staff to the chief technology officer due to her leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this role, she was responsible for overseeing the school system’s technology strategy, data governance, and multi-year digital transformation initiative. In order to investigate how technology and cross-sector collaboration can be leveraged to create efficient, integrated systems of essential services, she is currently pursuing a dual degree in MBA and MPP at the University of Chicago. She was one of three full-time students awarded a full-tuition merit scholarship to pursue an MBA and named a Neubauer Civic Scholar by the Booth School of Business. She is the only recipient of the Knas Family Scholarship and a Harris Merit Scholar at the Harris School of Public Policy, which combined to give her a 90% tuition merit scholarship to pursue her MPP. She has long supported progressive political and advocacy campaigns and is a member of Leadership Now Project, US Digital Response’s government advisor, a Chicago fellow at New Leaders Council, and more.
Malavika Kannan was raised in Central Florida after being born in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, and she was aware of the effects of racism, police brutality, and gun violence. When she was sixteen, she planned a school-wide walkout against gun violence with her high school classmates. She coordinated safer, more equitable communities as a teenager by working with groups like Giffords, the Women’s March, and March For Our Lives. Her Soros profile states that “her writing, an art form she views as inherently political, imaginative, and community oriented, is influenced by her formative experiences as an organiser.” Her writings cover politics, culture, and identity. She started writing “All the Yellow Suns,” a young adult book about a gay Indian American girl who grows up in Florida, battles violence, and finds love, during the pandemic. She is a senior at Stanford University and is passionate about women’s literature, South Asian studies, and creative writing. She will receive a BA in comparative studies in race and ethnicity upon graduation. In order to polish her writing and get ready for a career as a novelist and literature professor, she plans to pursue an MFA in fiction.
Aayush Karan was born into a family that immigrated to the US from India in order to pursue cancer biology research. The parents travelled around the US before settling in Wisconsin. According to his ASoros profile, he “published research in low-dimensional topology for which he was named a Regeneron Science Talent Search finalist and a Davidson fellow” and that is when he first fell in love with pure mathematics in high school. He continued to focus on computer science, physics, and mathematics as an undergraduate at Harvard, earning a summa cum laude degree in 2023 with a secondary in economics. He received the Sophia Freund Prize for academic standing and was chosen as a marshal of the Junior 24 for the Harvard Phi Beta Kappa chapter. For “his undergraduate research extending his background in mathematics to highly relevant scientific applications,” he was also granted a 2022 Barry Goldwater Scholarship. He is currently a PhD candidate in Harvard’s Quantum Science and Engineering programme, studying both classical and quantum computational learning. In order to ensure that the widely transformative potential of artificially intelligent systems is safely and effectively realised, he hopes to be actively involved in pushing the frontier of these systems.
Ananya Agustin Malhotra is a native of Georgia, having grown up there as the daughter of immigrants from the Philippines and India. Her Soros profile states, “She is deeply motivated by her mother and father’s family histories to advocate for a more just and peaceful future United States foreign policy, having grown up in a bi-cultural and interfaith household.” She is interested in issues related to peace and security, international law, and world history. She earned a Phi Beta Kappa degree and a summa cum laude degree from Princeton University, where she focused on the School of Public and International Affairs. She oversaw the Sexual Harassment/Assault Advising, Resources, and Education (SHARE) Peer Programme at Princeton as its president. She obtained a distinguished MPhil in modern European history while a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford. She has been a vocal supporter of nuclear disarmament and risk reduction for the past four years through her scholarly work, public commentary, and research. She has advanced policies for a safer and more peaceful world while working in Washington, DC, at the Nuclear Threat Initiative and the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. She is a part of the Emerging Voices Network of the British American Security Information Council and the Younger Generation Leaders Network on Euro-Atlantic Security (YGLN). She has worked on projects with Princeton University’s Programme on Science and Global Security and has written and co-written a number of policy briefs.
In Wood-Ridge, New Jersey, Akshay Swaminathan was born to Indian immigrants from Tamil Nadu. In 1969, his paternal grandparents moved to Westchester, New York, where they were among the few Indian families residing at the time. As per his Soros profile, “his experiences acquiring Indian music and language taught him the importance of overcoming social, linguistic, and generational barriers to connect with others.” He started self-studying foreign languages in high school after coming across an online polyglot community. According to his profile, he “eventually developed pedagogical techniques that helped him learn over ten languages.” He found joy in using languages to relate to and assist individuals from diverse backgrounds while attending Harvard College. He was the executive director of the global health nonprofit Refresh Bolivia, where he and his colleagues established a primary healthcare facility that provides care to 10,000 indigenous people living in Cochabamba. In addition, he oversaw the Harvard Chinatown ESL programme, which provides adult Chinese immigrants with free English instruction, and he authored five textbooks for Chinese speakers to learn the language. He is the creator of the website Start Speaking, which assists language learners in developing spoken fluency. He is co-author of the book “Winning with Data Science,” which was released by Columbia University Press, and has authored over 40 publications that use quantitative approaches to address issues in the healthcare industry. He created techniques at Flatiron Health to evaluate observational clinical data in order to assist FDA decision-making. In his capacity as Head of Data Science at the virtual mental health startup Cerebral, he and his colleagues implemented a suicide detection system that has benefited more than 500,000 patients nationwide. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in biomedical data science at Stanford University, where he is an MD candidate and a Knight-Hennessy Scholar.
