Spring 2010 Fellows

ABDULRASHEED ALABI is the son of supportive Nigerian parents who were seeking advanced degrees in the United States.  He is now pursuing MD and neuroscience PhD degrees at Stanford Medical School.  AbdulRasheed grew up in Nigeria but then returned to the United States to complete an undergraduate degree in biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins University where he was, and remains at Stanford, an active member of the Muslim community amongst other activities.  Balancing complex personal and financial responsibilities, he soon made his mark as a young researcher, a student leader, and a civic volunteer. For three summers, he conducted biomedical research with Dr. Emery Brown at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital culminating in a co-authored article in the American Journal of Physiology: Heart and Circulatory Physiology.  As an Undergraduate Scholar at the National Institutes of Health, he worked with Dr. Kenton Swartz on electrical signaling proteins in the nervous system, research that netted him a first-author article in Nature.  At Stanford he has been leader of the Student National Medical Association and the annual SUMMA (Stanford University Minority Medical Alliance) conference—where over 500 young people are encouraged to consider science and medicine. AbdulRasheed plans on a career as a physician-scientist-public advocate intent on innovative basic science for diagnostic, therapeutic and preventative applications. He also has a defined interest in international scientific exchange for biomedical development and enhanced educational opportunities in Africa.

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SHAH R. ALI came to this country from Pakistan at the age of 10. He quickly adapted to life in New Jersey and excelled in math and science: he spent two summers doing research in chemistry at New York University. He graduated summa cum laude in three years from the Honors College at the Newark campus of Rutgers University, where he spent additional years on a nanotechnology project to detect dopamine for potential diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease. His work led to several first- and second-author publications in Journal of the American Chemical Society and Analytical Chemistry, among others. Now 25, and a second-year medical student at Stanford University, Shah is working in the lab of Irving Weissman, where he is studying cardiogenesis using embryonic stem cells. He has recently become interested in neglected tropical diseases: in addition to helping organize a conference at Stanford Law School on access and drug development for neglected tropical diseases (NTDs), he is leading the Stanford chapter of Universities Allied for Essential Medicines and a related lecture series. He has also interned at the Institute for OneWorld Health. He hopes to dedicate his career to drug development for NTDs.

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OSCAR BAEZ received his BA in political science from Amherst College in 2008. As a student at Amherst, he studied abroad in China, Italy, and Argentina. On campus, Oscar worked for the Center for Community Engagement, was a student leader of the activist group La Causa, and developed a service opportunity for Amherst students in rural Dominican Republic. Recipient of a Thomas J. Watson fellowship, Oscar traveled to seven countries to study efforts in each case to promote the status of an endangered minority language.  A polyglot himself, he is fluent or proficient in Spanish, Mandarin, Italian, Portuguese, English, and studied Latin at Boston Latin School. He is committed to pursuing a public service career, and has interned in the Massachusetts State House and US District Court, in Senator Ted Kennedy’s Education office on Capitol Hill, and most recently in the Obama White House. Now 23, Oscar is currently working in his native Dominican Republic on Haiti relief efforts for the Clinton Foundation.  He moved from Santo Domingo to Boston with his family at age three. Oscar will pursue a master’s degree in public policy or international affairs beginning in Fall, 2010.

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ISRA BHATTY is currently a Rhodes Scholar and DPhil candidate at the University of Oxford, where she received an MSc in evidence based social intervention with distinction last summer.  After studying economics and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago, Isra went on to Yale Law School, where she will continue as a second-year student in the fall.  Drawing on her family’s own experiences, Isra has organized and led efforts to promote inclusion of individuals with disabilities in the United States. As an undergraduate, Isra coordinated a number of inner-city programs on the south side of Chicago and has continued to work with at-risk youth during her time in the U.K.  Isra has worked with the Department of Homeland Security on projects focused on countering radicalization and violent extremism. MS. BHATTY aspires to combine her research at the University of Oxford and her legal training at Yale to address two problems faced by our criminal justice system: the dearth of research establishing the effectiveness of intervention initiatives, and the subsequent failure of policy makers to identify and implement proven programs. Isra and her parents are naturalized citizens. Her parents now reside in Glenview, IL.

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ANDY CHEN was born in Los Angeles to Taiwanese immigrants. In 2009, he graduated from Princeton University where he majored in sociology and graduated magna cum laude with election to Phi Beta Kappa. He founded Princeton’s first graphic design initiative, the Student Design Agency, and was awarded the Pyne Honor Prize, the university’s highest general undergraduate distinction. He will enter the Rhode Island School of Design in September, 2010 for a three-year MFA in graphic design. Chen’s work focuses on design that addresses issues of social concern. His “Own What You Think” campaign against anonymous online hate speech garnered the attention of ABC’s “20/20” and BusinessWeek. In the summer of 2009, he completed an internship under Paula Scher at the New York office of Pentagram Design. Currently, as Fulbright Research Associate at the Royal College of Art’s Helen Hamlyn Centre, he is partnering with Age UK to create graphic design solutions that address social stigma surrounding aging and sexuality.

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SEAN CHEN is a senior at the college division of Juilliard, where he is a student of Jerome Lowenthal and Matti Raekallio. Raised in the Los Angeles area, Sean is the son of immigrants from Taiwan.  He will begin work on an advanced degree in piano performance in the fall, in preparation for a career as an internationally-touring soloist and a professor of piano.  Sean’s piano performances have won first prize in the Juilliard Concerto Competition (2008) and the prize for the Best Performance of an American Work at the Cleveland International Piano Competition (2009). He was also a finalist in the Juilliard Gina Bachauer Competition. In addition to his piano performance and related musical studies at Juilliard, Sean has cross registered for courses in mathematics, econometrics, finance, and computer programming at Columbia University.

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ZAHIR DOSSA was born in Canada before moving to Texas to parents of Indian heritage who had settled in, and then fled during the socialist regime from, Tanzania.  Zahir gained admission to MIT, where he and a fellow student founded an organization to distribute low-tech but very inexpensive irrigation pumps to low-income farmers in Sudan.  Their efforts were featured in an article in Popular Mechanics and a report on BBC World Radio.  Their organization has received various awards, including the $10,000 Davis Peace Prize.  Funded as an undergraduate by the Gates Foundation, Zahir graduated with majors in electrical engineering and computer science along with management.  He has remained at MIT, where he is now pursuing both a MEng in electrical engineering and a PhD in urban studies.   Continuing with his interest in international development, he has created a curriculum for practitioners and is working to create a minor in international development at MIT.

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TAREK GHANI was born in the United States to a Lebanese mother and an Afghan father, both recipients of US political asylum after violent conflict erupted in their home countries.   While an undergraduate at Stanford University, he suspended studies in 2002 to serve as special assistant to his father, who had returned to Afghanistan to serve as the country’s Finance Minister.  In that role, Tarek helped develop national plans for development and state-building reforms.  Tarek subsequently graduated from Stanford in 2004 with a BS in symbolic systems and Honors in international security after delivering the Baccalaureate graduation address.  After two years analyzing international security and development policy in Washington, DC, he then managed a $15 million grant budget with Humanity United, a philanthropic grant-maker committed to ending modern-day slavery and mass atrocities.  A Truman Scholar, Tarek is now in the first year of a PhD program in business and public policy at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley.

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RESHMAAN HUSSAM is the daughter of Bangladeshi immigrants to this country.  She was born in Virginia and graduated from MIT as a Burchard Scholar (a member of the Institute’s interdisciplinary honors program) in 2009 with a major in economics. She has undertaken empirical and interview-based research on such subjects as teenage pregnancy, dowries and independence of women in financial decisions, and the effects of patriarchy on the implementation of micro-credit.  She has also taken leadership roles in MIT’s interfaith dialogue group and the MIT Muslim Students Association.  She served as a youth columnist for America’s Muslim Family Magazine and an editor of a Cambridge-wide journal on Islam and society, Ascent Magazine. Beginning in the Fall of 2010, she will pursue a PhD in developmental economics.

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Currently a second-year MD student at Johns Hopkins, AMIT JAIN envisions a healthier, happier planet that he believes is conceivable through technological innovations and scientific breakthroughs. Amit is committed to making his contributions. Under mentorship of an eminent pediatric orthopaedic surgeon at Hopkins, Amit is keenly studying implant related fractures and spinal deformities in children. Amit graduated magna cum laude in bioengineering from the University of California at Berkeley in 2008 with elections to both Phi Beta Kappa and Tau Beta Pi. At Cal, Amit co-invented a novel method of examining tumor behavior in a three dimensional micro-environment and published his award winning work in Biomaterials. Amit was born in Ambala, India and in 1999 immigrated to US with his family when he was eleven. Amit’s parents live in Portland, OR. He enjoys adventure; he has climbed Mount Shasta, backpacked across Europe, and ran Baltimore's full marathon.

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BOWEN JIANG intends for a career in academic neurosurgery. To that end, he is currently a first-year MD candidate at Stanford School of Medicine. He received his bachelor’s degree in biological sciences, also from Stanford University. As a researcher at the National Cancer Institute, Stanford Center for Neuroscience, and The Johns Hopkins Hospital, he has published seven manuscripts and book chapters, notably in the Harvard Review of Psychiatry and Neurosurgical Focus. After college, he served as a Health Policy Fellow for the former US Assistant Surgeon General, where he produced editorials for the Huffington Post and Washington Times and launched campaigns to the Obama administration that played a significant role in lifting the HIV/AIDS immigration ban. A medical entrepreneur, he co-founded a 501c3 NGO to deliver telemedicine to Ethiopia and was a founding member of Cascade Clean Energy, a Forbes featured start-up, that is developing patented technology to curb the spread of wastewater-borne diseases. Now 23, he was born in Beijing and grew up in Shenyang, China before immigrating to the US at the age of ten. He and his parents are naturalized citizens and reside in Clarksburg, MD.

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JONAH LALAS is the son of Filipino immigrants. Raised in California, he graduated summa cum laude with election to Phi Beta Kappa from University of California at Los Angeles where he was the student speaker at his commencement ceremony.  He did summer internships with the ACLU, the Public Defender Service in Washington, D.C. and the UCLA Labor Center, where he organized Filipino healthcare workers. Upon graduation he joined the Service Employees International Union in Los Angeles. He then moved to Texas where, as organizing director, he led the effort to organize the 13,000 city employees in Houston. The campaign resulted in a historic first contract that included improved wages and benefits and established a $10/hr minimum wage. He is now pursuing a law degree at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law (Boalt Hall).

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LAUREL YONG-HWA LEE is a second-year MD candidate at Harvard Medical School.  She earned a DPhil in immunology at Oxford University, where she was a Rhodes Scholar.  She led a large-scale study of human immune response against the avian influenza A (H5N1) virus in the UK and Vietnam. Her study culminated in a research article in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, of which she is the lead author. She graduated from MIT with degrees in brain and cognitive science and biology.  At MIT, she was a varsity rower and was named a Burchard Scholar for excellence in the arts and humanities.  She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the NIH Exceptional Summer Research Award, Glamour magazine's Top 10 College Women of the Year, and USA Today’s All-USA College Academic First Team. Laurel envisions a career as a physician-scientist.  She was born in South Korea and is a naturalized citizen.

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MARGARET LEE was born in Glendale, CA to parents who had emigrated the previous year from South Korea.   In the UCLA Honors Program, she double majored in sociology and Asian American studies, graduating summa cum laude with election to Phi Beta Kappa.  As a sophomore, she wrote her honors thesis examining the intersections of educational attainment and mental health within the Korean-American community, for which she received the Wasserman Fellowship and the UCLA Undergraduate Research Award.  Following two years of non-profit work in China and Indonesia, she earned a master’s degree in social work at UCLA, where she founded the International Social Work Caucus.  Since receiving her MSW, she has served as a community organizer for Asian-Americans and American Indians, focusing on mental health issues.  She is concurrently a second-year PhD student in social welfare at UCLA and continues to specialize in mental health policies and programs for Asian communities.

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EMILY MARTIN is currently pursuing an MFA degree in poetry and translation at Columbia University. She came to the US from Switzerland six years ago for undergraduate work at Columbia from which she graduated Phi Beta Kappa in literature and writing. During her senior year, she was the executive editor for Quarto, Columbia’s oldest student-run literary journal. The child of a Swiss father and English mother, Emily grew up fully bilingual in French and English and began writing poetry – now widely published -- in both languages. In addition, she has published English translations of French poetry. Previously an assistant editor at Bennington College in Vermont, Emily has interned at The New Yorker, Simon & Schuster, and Farrar, Straus, & Giroux. Her translations are forthcoming in Cerise Press and Absinthe: New European Writing. Her poetry has appeared in the Spoon River Poetry Review, The Dalhousie Review, Borderlands, Mid-American Review, Dos Passos Review, Western Humanities Review and Revue Europe (France), among others. Ultimately, she hopes to combine work as a poet, a translator of French poetry, and a professor of writing.

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HELEN O’REILLY is a second-year JD degree candidate at Yale University. After graduating magna cum laude from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service in 2003, she spent three years at Advocates for Children in New York City as an education advocate for detained and incarcerated youth with learning disabilities. In 2006, she was selected as a Luce Scholar, spending the next two years in Manila and Hong Kong as an advocate for migrant domestic workers. Currently, Helen is a member of the Immigration and Legal Services Clinic and the Workers and Immigration Rights Advocacy Clinic at Yale Law School. In addition, she co-directed the 16th Annual Yale Rebellious Lawyering Conference and served as co-student director of the San Francisco Affirmative Litigation Project at Yale. She spent her first summer at the US Attorney’s Office in the Eastern District of New York, in the Public Integrity Division. Raised in Jackson Heights, Queens to naturalized parents from Ireland, Helen also speaks fluent Spanish.

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TONY PAN grew up in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. It wasn’t until he was a high school senior that his family’s green card application was finally approved and Tony was able to accept an offer of admission and financial aid from Stanford University.  He graduated four years later with a BS in Physics, winning the J.E. Wallace Sterling Award for Scholastic Achievement and an award for outstanding performance in physics. Tony also taught science to underprivileged youth and served as a resident tutor in physics and mathematics for freshmen.  After a year at Goldman Sachs, he is now pursuing a PhD in theoretical astrophysics at Harvard University. His current research is centered on exploring a “new method to study the very first stars, galaxies, and cosmic gas at the epoch of reionization, when the first sources of light turned on in this universe.” Using Gamma-Ray Bursts as the main source of data, he hopes that his research will “launch next generation radio technologies” for astrophysics.

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SOCHEATA POEUV and her family were resettled in this country when she was two.  Her family escaped the “killing fields” of Cambodia and was settled in a refugee camp in Thailand, where Socheata was born.  She grew up in Texas, attended Smith College, and graduated cum laude in 2002 with a degree in English literature.  Only as a young adult did she learn from her parents that her elder “sisters” were in fact cousins whose  parents had died under the Khmer Rouge and that her “brother” was the son of her mother’s first husband, who had also perished.  Socheata’s first film, the award-winning New Year Baby, documents her uncovering of many additional hidden aspects of her family’s experiences in Khmer Rouge-controlled Cambodia.   It was shown nation wide on PBS.  She subsequently founded Khmer Legacies to help other Cambodian families begin to share the traumas of their experiences in Cambodia with younger generations   Socheata has applied for MBA programs in order to acquire business skills relevant to her organizing goals.

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HARI PRABHAKAR was born in Dallas, TX to south Indian parents who had come to this country three years earlier.  He majored in public health studies at The Johns Hopkins University, graduated in 2007, and was selected to be a British Marshall Scholar.  While at Johns Hopkins he became aware of, and committed to alleviating, the grossly inadequate health care provided to indigenous populations in India.  He has conducted extensive health services research in tribal areas of India and has become a leading advocate of efforts to improve access to care for Sickle Cell Disease, a major public health problem internationally, over the past 6 years. To that end, he established the Tribal India Health Foundation and the Sickle Cell Disease Center in South India. He has simultaneously focused on improving care for sickle cell patients in the United States through numerous publications and development of action plans, guidebooks, and primers for public and private agencies. Hari received his MScPH from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and an MSc in international health management from the Imperial College in London.  He is now a first-year student at Harvard Medical School.

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CAMILO A. ROMERO is a first-year JD candidate at New York University School of Law.  He received a BA in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley, and published two honors theses, one on the politics of Salsa music.  He funded his own way through school with scholarships and employment, and was a Bill and Melinda Gates Millennium Scholar. Now 28, Camilo was born in Costa Mesa, CA.  His mother was born in Colombia and was naturalized in 1994. Camilo intends a career as a human rights litigator and organizer working on international labor and immigrant rights.  He has worked as a union organizer in Colombia and as legal adviser with a human rights firm. He also founded BlackBrown Projects in New York, which fosters dialogue and mentorship to improve relations between African-American and Latino communities.

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KATARINA RUSCIC was born in Zagreb, Croatia and became a naturalized US citizen at the age of 15. She 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.   She 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: she is currently in 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.

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ELINA SARKISOVA belongs to the minority Armenian community that had long been resident in Azerbaijan.  When she was six, she and her family fled to Moscow in the face of anti-Armenian violence resulting from the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. Two years later, they were resettled in Connecticut under the US Refugee Admissions Program.  Elina graduated from Georgetown University with a BS cum laude in international politics.  As a student, she interned at the Genocide Prevention Center, the US Embassy in the Republic of Georgia, former Senator Joe Biden’s office, and BBC News.   Following graduation, Elina joined the US Department of State, first at the Office of the Legal Adviser and then at the US Refugee Admissions Program (the same program that facilitated her own admission to the United States).   She served for one year as a refugee officer on the Iraq Team, and currently oversees US refugee resettlement operations in Europe and Central Asia. Elina plans to begin work towards a master’s degree in international and public affairs in the fall of 2010.

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DEEP SHAH was born in Atlanta, GA eight years after his parents immigrated to this country from Gujarat in India.  He entered the University of Georgia with 21 AP credits; won a Truman scholarship; graduated summa cum laude with majors in biology and international affairs; elected to Phi Beta Kappa, was named the 2008 Georgia Outstanding Scholar; and received a Rhodes scholarship.  He has served as a Legislative Fellow in the US Senate.  Deep has also held internships with the Greater New York Hospital Association and the Veterans Health Administration, as well as programs that took him to Costa Rica and Japan.  Subsequent to beginning his medical studies, he worked as a project manager with the Georgia Governor’s Office to design a low-cost private health insurance plan for the working poor.  Deep’s research on Parkinson’s disease resulted in two jointly-authored publications. At Oxford, he earned a master’s degree in comparative social policy with a focus on health care.  He is currently a first year student at Harvard Medical School.

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NAMAN SHAH was born in Charlotte, NC to parents who had emigrated from India.  He graduated with highest honors and distinction in public service from the University of North Carolina (UNC), where he majored in environmental health in the School of Public Health.  He was a North Carolina Leadership Fellow and an IBM Watson fellow.  Naman developed and helped introduce in Cambodia a test that identifies drug resistance in malarial parasites.  Following graduation he worked in polio case surveillance and related immunization activities in a rural district in India.  His meta-analysis of research on malaria drug resistance provided an evidence base for Indian officials to modify their malaria drug policy.  Naman is now a third-year candidate for the MD and PhD degrees in the Medical Scientist Training Program at UNC.  His recent projects include entrepreneurial ventures such as the introduction of a new, low-cost water purifier into emerging rural markets.

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AARTI SHAHANI was born in Casablanca, Morocco to parents of Indian heritage.  Their search for a more permanent home led them to settle in this country when she was a baby.  Aarti attended the University of Chicago, where she was an honors graduate in anthropology in 2002.  While she was growing up, her father and uncle ran afoul of immigration requirements. She spent the better parts of nine years in an effort – eventually successful – to avert her father’s deportation. She drew on these experiences with immigration-related bureaucracies and courts systems to establish and lead Families for Freedom, a non-profit which assists families that have members who are under threat of deportation.  Her advocacy efforts have been publicized on National Public Radio, in numerous newspaper articles, and through commentary and bills that were addressed in Congress.   Aarti is currently a first year student in public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. After completing her master’s degree there she plans to enter an MBA program at one of several business schools.

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SHIRAG SHEMMASSIAN is of Armenian descent.  He was born in Santa Monica, CA to parents who emigrated from Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War.  He was an undergraduate at both UCLA and Cornell, graduating from the latter with a degree in human development.   He has worked extensively with Armenian and other immigrant communities, participating in Cornell’s Urban Semester Program, during which he volunteered at a hospital in addition to mentoring youth in underserved neighborhoods in Brooklyn.  Living with Tourette Syndrome, Shirag has focused his work experience and scholarship on the pathophysiology of childhood behavioral disorders, including ADHD and Tic disorders.  In order to better prepare himself for a career in research and clinical practice, he is currently pursuing a PhD in clinical psychology at UCLA.

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DENA SIMMONS grew up in the Bronx.  Her mother came to this country from Antigua as a very young woman, alone and without significant resources.   Showing great academic promise, Dena obtained support to attend a Connecticut prep school and subsequently won a Truman Scholarship and graduated magna cum laude from Middlebury College as a Spanish major and teacher education minor.  She served as a public health volunteer in Antigua, where she worked with the Directorate of Gender Affairs to provide better health services for Dominican sex workers.  Awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to the Dominican Republic, Dena studied the collaboration between schools and health agencies in efforts to prevent teenage pregnancy.  She continued her academic training at Pace University where she earned a Master’s degree in childhood education in 2008.   Having taught for several years in the South Bronx, first through the Teach For America program, Dena is now pursuing a doctorate in health education at Columbia’s Teachers College.

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VANARA TAING was born in a Thai refugee camp to Cambodian parents.  In 1979, her parents escaped on foot from Cambodia during the Vietnamese invasion of their country.  Two years after Vanara was born, the family was resettled in Washington State.  Her parents divorced and Vanara and her two siblings were raised by a single mother. Vanara attended Scripps College and, at graduation, won the award for the best thesis in the English Department.  She subsequently received a master’s degree from Harvard’s School of Education and is currently a producer at StoryCorps, a national oral history project.  Interested in film as well as audio production, for more than a year, Vanara taught a video workshop for youth in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn and recently co-produced a film, Beyond the Music, which has been shown at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the Anthology Film Archive.  She has applications pending at several MFA programs in film production and editing.

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PHILIP TANEDO was born in Los Angeles to parents who had emigrated from the Philippines.  As an undergraduate at Stanford he won a Goldwater scholarship, graduated with majors in physics and mathematics, and was awarded a British Marshall Scholarship. Under Marshall auspices, Philip earned a master’s degree in physics from Durham University and a Certificate of Advanced Study (with merit in mathematics) from Cambridge University. As a teenager, Philip had been largely unsuccessful in trying to find Asian-American – and particularly Filipino-American – role models.   As a result, he has worked hard to serve as an active role model for Filipino-American youth who are interested in science and mathematics.  Now at Cornell University, Philip is pursuing a PhD in physics with support from the National Science Foundation.  He blogs on his life and research via the Large Hadron Collider website.

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QUANG TRAN begins a dual degree program in education and management at Stanford in September.  A graduate of Harvard with a BA in social studies, magna cum laude, she spent several years in finance and industry before becoming manager of strategic planning for Green Dot schools in 2008, an effort in the poorest areas of Los Angeles to provide eighteen charter high schools.  (See: http://www.greendot.org). At Harvard, she was a John Harvard Scholar, Gates Millennium Scholar, and received the Mill-Taylor Prize for Best Essay in Social Theory.  She headed the Harvard Vietnamese Association and volunteered with Boston Refugee Youth Enrichment Programs   Born in Vietnam, she is now 26.  She emigrated with her parents and two siblings from Vietnam in 1993 to southern California, where they currently reside.  They are naturalized US citizens.

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YIFAN XU was born in Beijing, and lived with her grandparents for two years while her parents established themselves in the United States.  Yifan joined them when she was six and the family eventually settled in Eden Prairie, MN.  She was admitted to Duke University, where she won undergraduate scholarships from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the National Science Foundation.  She founded and served as editor and graphic designer for an undergraduate journal that published work on mind, brain and behavioral research.  Yifan graduated cum laude in biology and visual arts and is now pursuing MD and PhD degrees at the Cornell/Rockefeller University/Sloan-Kettering Tri-Institutional program.  Her current research focuses on finding ways to modulate pain circuits so that their signals can temper the perception of pain.  In addition to this basic neural circuit research, she has also engaged in learning the realities of clinical pain management issues through patient care, taking part in a chronic pain research project at New York Presbyterian Hospital.

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