ARIS BARAS is a second-year medical student at Duke University, where he was an undergraduate. Graduating from Duke in 2007, he majored in biology, graduated summa cum laude and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in his junior year and to Sigma Xi. He has completed multiple research internships at Duke University, Becton-Dickinson Technologies, the National Institutes of Health and at two related medical technology and investment groups in the Research Triangle Park where he helped a research team to implement the PRINT technology (Pattern Replication in Non-Wetting Templates) and to vet and pursue investment strategies in high tech start-ups. He heads the Medicine and Business Interest Group at Duke Medical School and founded and directed the Duke Biotechnology Society. He has presented research work at eight important professional meetings and is a co-author on eight publications in major journals. Aris intends a career in clinical medicine focusing on major disease states, where translational research and commercial development of medical technology and drugs are central. Now 24, Aris was born in the United States to naturalized US citizen parents from Greece. The family resides in Potomac, Maryland.

MANAV BHATNAGAR is a third-year JD student at Yale. He previously attended Harvard University, graduating magna cum laude with degrees in South Asian Studies and Government. While still in high school he worked with Tibetan refugees in Dharamsala, India, before spending his college summers working in Kashmir with a pro bono legal clinic and a local human rights organization. He continues to work on Kashmir-related human rights issues, in addition to work with the National Sudan Divestment Taskforce, as a researcher for the Harvard Law School Human Rights Program, and as a member of the Yale Law School International Human Rights Clinic. In addition, he has worked on foreign policy issues as a Research Associate with the Managing the Atom Project at Harvard's Kennedy School and the Council on Foreign Relations. Manav intends to use his education in the service of the US government in a legal or policymaking capacity. Manav was born in 1984 in Oxford, MS to parents who came to this country from India; he was raised in Milwaukee, WI. His parents are naturalized US citizens.

HEIDI BOUTROS is a first-year law student at Yale University. She completed her MPhil degree in International Relations at Oxford University, where she was a Marshall Scholar. She completed her BA in Government and Plan II Liberal Arts Honors at the University of Texas at Austin, where she graduated summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, and was awarded a Truman Scholarship. She was also selected as a Goldman Sachs Global Leader. While still an undergraduate, Heidi wrote a country report for the UN World Conference against Racism, interned with the International Justice Mission in India, worked on the Milosevic trial at the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague, and investigated prison conditions in Russia for the Moscow Center for Prison Reform. Her senior thesis evaluated the motives behind attacks against white farmers in post-apartheid South Africa. Before embarking on her Oxford program, Heidi interned with the Public Defender Service of DC, investigating felonies on behalf of indigents, and later worked for the FBI, where she analyzed drug trafficking and money laundering intelligence. More recently, she has worked with USAID in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Heidi intends a career as "a leader in the human rights field," which requires "expertise in both law and international relations." Now 26, Heidi was born in the United States to Christian parents who emigrated from Egypt. Her mother lives in Dallas, TX and is a naturalized US citizen.

MARIANO CASTILLO is a second-year student in the Master's in International Affairs program at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA). His undergraduate work was at Texas A&M, where he graduated in 2002 with a degree in journalism and international studies. At Texas A&M, Mariano worked on the university newspaper, The Battalion, rising to be its editor-in-chief. He also served as an intern at two South American newspapers, El Comercio in Lima, Peru and The Daily Journal in Caracas, Venezuela. Mariano was appointed chief of a one-man Rio Grande Bureau, where he covered three South Texas counties and Mexico. He then served as Criminal Justice Enterprise Reporter, before becoming chief of another one-man bureau in Laredo, Texas, this time responsible for the US-Mexican border and issues relating to the drug war. Mariano sees himself as a "writer" as much as a "reporter." He expects to return to a career in journalism, but hopes to write books that make scholarly discussions accessible to larger audiences. Mariano was born 28 years ago in Lima, Peru. The family moved to Texas when he was six. They are naturalized US citizens.

CAROLYN CHEN is in her first year of her PhD program in music composition at the University of California, San Diego where she also completed an MA program in music composition. An undergraduate at Stanford, she graduated in 2006 with honors and distinction in Music and with honors in Humanities. Carolyn served as co-chair of Stanford Asian American Activism Committee and developed and co-led a student-organized course on Asian American politics. Carolyn conceives of her music as a response to her political emotions. Of Pipe, which won the Stanford 2005 Humanities and Sciences Prize in Music, she wrote, "I heard about . . . two men . . . beating the Sikh owner [of a convenience store in L.A.]'s head with steel pipes, asking 'Are you Osama bin Laden?' . . . I could not stop thinking about . . . the physical sensation of holding a vibrating object, knowing that its vibration was caused by contact with another person, . . .These were eventually pieced together into a score for solo flute. . . ." For her composition, Muse, mute, Carolyn won the 2006 Sudler Prize for Excellence in the Creative Arts. Central to Carolyn's composing are the dynamics of creative interaction between composer, listener, and performer, and among performers. Carolyn's family is from Taiwan. She was born in Redbank, New Jersey, but her family moved to San Jose, California, where her parents continue to reside. They are naturalized US citizens.

CONNIE CHEN is a first-year medical student at the Univeristy of California, San Francisco. She graduated from Harvard University with a Bachelor's degree in Economics. Throughout college, she has sought to bring about institutional changes on issues relating to her great passion: reducing inequities in global health. As a leader with the international student advocacy group "Universities Allied for Essential Medicines," Connie helped to spearhead the "Philadelphia Consensus Statement on Access to Health-Related Innovations," which has been signed by a number of luminaries including several Nobel laureates and international policy makers ranging from Jeffrey Sachs to Paul Farmer. The document has greatly helped to raise the profile of the global health implications of university licensing. Connie's concern for addressing inequalities in health outcomes has also been reflected in her service as Vice President for Advocacy of the Harvard AIDS Coalition, her tenure as the senior international editor of the Harvard Health Policy Review and through her internships with the Chilean Ministry of Health and the Clinton Foundation HIV/AIDS Initiative's Cambodia office. For her senior economics thesis, Connie traveled to Kenya to conduct field research on female sex work. Connie has also committed herself to service in the local Boston community, co-leading a prisoner education program and helping to establish a Harvard tutoring program for female offenders transitioning back into their communities. As co-programming chair of the Phillips Brooks House Association at Harvard, she oversaw the day-to-day running of 73 service and advocacy programs. Connie was born 21 years ago in Chicago, to parents who came to this country from Taipei.

AGNIESZKA CZECHOWICZ is a third-year medical student at Stanford University. She earned an undergraduate degree with honors, also from Stanford, in Biological Sciences and received the Firestone medal for outstanding senior thesis. Agnieszka is first author on a paper published in the November 2007 issue of Science which shows a possible way to eliminate the toxicity of bone marrow transplantation (BMT), a discovery that could expand the applications of BMT to include cures for most blood diseases, as well as autoimmune diseases like diabetes. She holds a patent pertaining to this work. Agnieszka also started "Women and Research/Medicine," a group to support female medical school students' professional lives. In addition, she is a TA in a Pediatric Chronic Disease class and Histology class, a student government representative, and a mentor to many undergraduates. She has been a clinical and public health intern in Honduras, a BioBridge Advisor and was an executive member of Stanford's first Dance Marathon. Agnieszka aspires to be a medical scientist focusing on "biomedical research with direct clinical applications." Agnieszka, twenty-three-years-old, was born in Poland. She grew up in Minnesota, and her family now resides in California. All are naturalized citizens.

SUDEB DALAI is a second year medical student at Stanford University, where he is completing his MSc and is beginning a PhD in a joint MD/PhD program. He holds a BS in Brain and Cognitive Sciences from MIT, where he won the Karl Taylor Compton Award, MIT's highest undergraduate leadership award, and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He is a Howard Hughes research fellow. Sudeb's current research investigates viral evolution, pathogenesis, and drug resistance in HIV-1 subtype C in sub-Saharan Africa. He has served as a visiting scientist at the National Institute for Communicable Diseases in Johannesburg, South Africa; the Zimbabwe AIDS Prevention Project; and the Joint Clinical Research Centre in Uganda. At MIT, he helped found a non-profit organization that collected unexpired AIDS drugs and donated them to Dr. Paul Farmer's HIV Equity Initiative in Haiti. Sudeb was President of his class at MIT and currently serves on the MIT Board of Trustees. He has also completed the Boston Marathon, and serves as the vocalist and guitarist of a small band in Palo Alto, CA. After finishing his education at Stanford, he hopes to complete a residency in pediatrics and a fellowship in infectious disease, ultimately focusing on maternal and infant mortality in the developing world. Sudeb was born in Marshall, Missouri in 1980 and grew up in the nearby town of Nevada. His parents emigrated from India to the United States in 1975. They are naturalized US citizens.

ERIC DING is a second-year MD candidate at the Boston University School of Medicine. After receiving his BA with honors in Public Health from the Johns Hopkins University, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, he earned his dual-doctorates in Epidemiology and in Nutrition from Harvard University. Eric played a major role in the two-year-long investigation into drug safety of Vioxx that drew national attention. Published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Eric was recognized and named in the New York Times and USA Today. He is also the Founder and Director of the Campaign for Cancer Research, with 3 million registered members, and featured in Newsweek. Eric also co-founded at Johns Hopkins the public health journal Epidemic Proportions, which was recognized by university deans and the director of the National Institutes of Health. Eric's two dozen publications have also received 130 external citations in just two years. Eric also currently serves as an appointed expert committee member on the World Health Organization's Global Burden of Disease Project. Eric's goal is to become an effective physician-scientist focused on preventive and translational medicine. Now 24 years old, Eric was born in Shanghai. He immigrated to the United States at the age of five and is a naturalized citizen. His parents reside in Pennsylvania. Recently, Eric was a research associate at the Department of Nutrition at Harvard School of Public Health on American Diabetes Association Postdoctoral Fellowship.

RENE FLORES is attending Princeton University to pursue a joint PhD degree in Sociology and Social Policy. He received his bachelor's degree in interdisciplinary studies this December from the University of California, Berkeley. He graduated summa cum laude with election to Phi Beta Kappa. He was a Haas Scholar and a McNair Scholar. Rene has conducted research in Central America, resulting in a chapter in a book to be published by Duke University Press. More recently, he explored the anti-immigration movement in Hazleton, PA. In addition, Rene formed an Elementary School mentoring program, developed a community organic garden, and helped unionize an otherwise un-unionizable Marriott Hotel. Rene aspires to a career as a "public sociologist," specializing in inequality, immigration and political xenophobia. He plans to not only understand xenophobia but also to plan "strategies that could be deployed in areas with high ethnic animosity to diffuse the tension." Now 28, Rene was raised in Mexico City and came to the United States in 1999 to stay with his brother in San Diego when a student strike, which shut down his Law School in Mexico City, was severely repressed by the Government. He is now on a green card.

SUSHMA GANDHI is in her third year at Harvard Law School. She graduated magna cum laude from Yale University in 2003, majoring in history and ethnicity, race and migration. She received the Andrew White and Richard C. Hegel senior thesis awards. Sushma used her biweekly column for the Yale Daily News to describe the local manifestations of national and international policy problems, acquainting her classmates with the larger environment in which they studied and lived. After graduation from Yale, she ran Mayor DeStefano's campaign for re-election and subsequently took a job directing the mayor's efforts to receive the Democratic party nomination for Governor. While working for Mayor DeStefano, she participated in a successful city-wide effort to force a demutualizing bank to establish a "city bank" to focus on community issues, helping her realize how critical safe credit is to the stability of communities. Sushma has focused her legal interests on economic security issues for people and communities, working currently on the threat of foreclosures resulting from subprime loans though her clinical and advocacy work, academic writing and contributions to the Warren Reports blog. With plans to work as a consumer advocate at a private financial institution, Sushma aspires to start her "own socially minded private bank that is committed to political advocacy and focused on providing credit in distressed urban centers and credit-needy countries." Now 26, Sushma was born in the US. Her parents are Indian by origin and are now naturalized US citizens. They live in Granada Hills, California.

ELSIE GYANG is a third-year student at Stanford Medical School. Double-promoted twice in her earlier years, Elsie gained admission to Stanford when she was 16. At Stanford, she worked 20-30 hours per week but still managed to earn a research grant for work in developmental psychology, serve as a peer health educator, play in the woodwind sections of the Stanford Marching Band and Wind Ensemble, tutor disadvantaged children in East Palo Alto and win the prize awarded to the outstanding African-American student majoring in Human Biology. In addition, she has been Co-President of the Stanford Chapter of the Student National Medical Association, a policy researcher for the Community Health Partnership, a mental health analyst and a public policy intern at the Mental Health Association of San Francisco. She now has a Medical Scholars grant to investigate the incidence of silent stroke in children with sickle cell disease. Elsie matriculated at Stanford Medical School in 2006, with the intention of becoming a pediatrician while also developing research projects that would address issues of mental health care for patients with chronic medical disease. Elsie, 24, was born in Nigeria and brought to the US. Her mother resides in Rosedale, NY. They are naturalized US citizens.

MOHAMAD HALAWI is a third-year medical student at Duke University. He graduated in 2005 from the University of Houston, summa cum laude, in biochemical and biophysical sciences. On graduation, he received a fellowship award at the NIH, training in the field of genomics. He is a co-author in two journal publications arising from that work. He is a Jack Kent Cooke Scholar, American Association for Cancer Research Thomas J. Bardos Scholar, and Merage Foundation for the American Dream Fellow. In 2005, he was named Golden Key's International Student Leader of the Year. He plans a career in academic medicine, developing novel genomics-based therapeutics for musculoskeletal disorders and solid tumors while integrating these innovations into public policy. Mohamad was born in Lebanon and came to the United States on his own in 2000. He is a naturalized US citizen.

WILLIAM HWANG is attending Harvard Univeristy in an MD/PhD program. He was an MSc student in chemical biology at Oxford University, where he is a Rhodes Scholar. His undergraduate majors at Duke were in biomedical engineering, electrical and computer engineering, and physics with a minor in chemistry. He graduated summa cum laude with election to Tau Beta Pi and Phi Beta Kappa. He held a Goldwater scholarship, the A.B. Duke 4-year merit scholarship, several awards for outstanding research and service, and was a member of the 2006 All-USA College Academic First Team. William has conducted research at the Naval Surface Warfare Center, the Office of Naval Research, MIT, Georgetown, Duke, and now at the Chemistry Research Laboratory and Radcliffe Hospital at Oxford. He is the editor/author of three books, three book chapters, and thirteen refereed journals and conference publications. William played volleyball at Duke and now at Oxford, where he is the Captain of the Varsity team. He was first violinist in the Duke orchestra, senior editor of Duke's undergraduate humanities journal, and associate editor of the undergraduate science journal. He is the Founder and Executive Director of United InnoWorks Academy (www.innoworks.org), a non-profit organization that delivers free, innovative educational programs in science and engineering for middle school children from disadvantaged backgrounds. InnoWorks is run entirely by more than 200 passionate college volunteers at nine campuses and was a winner of the 2007 BR!CK Award. It has produced ten summer programs for over 300 students, developed three curricula, and published two books. Now 23, William was born in the United States, where his parents emigrated from Taiwan and Hong Kong and became naturalized US citizens. The family resides in Potomac, Maryland. William hopes to become "the best biomedical researcher, educator, and mentor for future generations of inquisitive leaders."

SANJA JAGESIC is attending the University of Chicago to gain her PhD in Sociology. She graduated from Wellsley College majoring in sociology and German. In 2006, she was given the Best Paper Award from the International Academy of Linguistics Conference in Behavioral and Social Sciences. She intends to pursue a PhD in sociology, focusing on educational inequalities in the American public school system. Sanja volunteered and interned at a nonprofit, called Teen Voices, which assists urban high school girls in amassing resources for college education. She has also supervised field testing of an after-school program evaluation tool for the National Institute on Out-of-School Time. Sanja's career goal is to "find the best ways in which persons from underprivileged backgrounds can survive the pitfalls and inequalities present in the American education system." Now 21, Sanja, as a refugee, fled Bosnia along with her family to Germany and then arrived in the United States in 1999. Her parents now live in Massachusetts. They are all naturalized citizens.

JONAS KETTERLE is a senior at Stanford University, and will begin a Master's program in Mechanical Engineering at Stanford this fall. Now 21 and a green card holder, Jonas was born in Germany and immigrated with his family in 1990. Believing the discussion about energy at Stanford was too narrow, he organized an interdisciplinary conference that brought together major perspectives and some of the leaders in the international debate. Jonas works as a student representative for a committee of architects and engineers designing a Green Dorm at Stanford. He has interned with Rumsey Engineers, Lockheed Martin Space Systems, and the Fraunhofer Institute, and is a Morris K. Udall Scholar. Jonas plans a career in sustainable design. He pursues graduate education in engineering in order to equip himself with the technical expertise his career requires. Jonas hopes also to contribute to policy debates and conversations about energy and climate change.

NOORAIN KHAN is completing her MPhil in Migration Studies at the University of Oxford, where she is a Rhodes Scholar. She previously obtained a BA from Rice University and studied abroad at the American University in Cairo. She plans to pursue a JD and work in migration policy. Now 23, she was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to US naturalized citizen parents from Pakistan. Noorain has devoted considerable energy to promoting participation of Muslims in US society and interfaith understanding; her current research focuses on religious dress in immigrant communities. In addition, she has interned with several prominent organizations, including the Baker Institute of Public Policy, the Middle East Institute, and Google Inc., where she worked in public policy and government affairs to create geopolitical risk modeling tools.

SANDEEP KISHORE is a third-year MD/PhD candidate at the Weill Cornell/ Rockefeller/Sloan Kettering Tri-Institutional program. He received a BS in Biology from Duke University and an MS in Immunology/Pathology from Oxford. Now 25, Sandeep was born in Pittsburgh and grew up primarily in Arkansas and Virginia; his parents are naturalized US citizens from India. Sandeep plans a career in global public health as a physician-scientist and public health advocate. To combat the rise in heart disease globally, Sandeep worked with the Dean of Weill Cornell, public health officials, and a fellow classmate to petition successfully the World Health Organization to include a generic version of American blockbuster cholesterol-lowering drugs (statins) on the WHO's Essential Medicines List, enabling mass drug donation by UN organizations and philanthropic foundations to 156 national governments. Apart from his advocacy work, Sandeep has done extensive research, a new line of which relates to the characteristics of gene activation in the parasite that causes malaria, with the ultimate goal of revealing a new set of potential malarial drug targets. At Duke, he was chair of the Duke Honor Council and editor-in-chief of the Duke scientific and ethics journals.

ROBERT KOFFIE is a first-year student of the Harvard MD/PhD program pursuing his MD training through the joint Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology. He will soon begin work on a PhD in Biophysics. Robert completed his undergraduate work at Indiana University in three years, graduating summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa with B.S. degrees in Physics and Biochemistry. At Indiana, he held the Herman B. Wells Scholarship. In addition, he was a recipient of Goldwater and McNair scholarships. Now 25, Robert was born in Ghana and came to the US in 2002. He holds a green card. Passionate about physics, biochemistry and mathematics, Robert worked in many laboratories at Indiana. The results of one study will be submitted to the Journal of the American Chemical Society for publication, with Robert as the first author. While still in Ghana, he volunteered with Doctors Without Borders, helping to care for villagers with infectious diseases in Ghana and Togo. Robert helped found the Indiana University (IU) Organization of Black Chemists, served as the community service chair of the Black Student Union, coordinated events for the IU Science Olympiad, represented student government on the IU Family Student Council, interned in the Emergency Department of the Bloomington Hospital, and volunteered with Red Cross blood drives. He intends to be a physician-scientist.

KYLE MENG received his bachelor's degree in civil and environmental engineering from Princeton University in 2005, graduating with honors in his major and receiving at graduation a prize for the best thesis in the School of Engineering. He also received certificates in music performance and environmental studies. Starting in the fall of 2008, Kyle will begin a PhD program in Sustainable Development at Columbia University. His intention is to develop an expertise in environmental economics especially as applied to climate change policy in China and other rapidly developing countries. Now 25, Kyle was born in China and joined his parents in the US in 1989. He and his parents are naturalized US citizens. The family resides in Millwood, New York. Two extended periods conducting research in China, including a year as Princeton's prestigious Martin Dale Fellow, prepared Kyle to make a specialty of the climate implications to China's unprecedented modernization. Kyle is now a research fellow at Environmental Defense Fund, where he works on advancing climate policy in China and the US as well as participating in the international climate negotiations process. Several publications have come out of this work. Kyle intends a career that permits him to have a positive contribution towards solving climate change. While his disciplinary home will be in economics, Kyle will continue to pursue the multidisciplinary intersection of science, policy, and law as it is relevant to climate change.

CAROLINA MONTANO is a first-year MD/PhD student at The Johns Hopkins University Medical School. Now 28, Carolina was born in Barranquilla, Colombia. Her father, a civic leader in the Magdalena region, was targeted by terrorists and the family fled to Florida on an asylum status, where they now reside. She is on a green card. Though having completed three years of medical education in Colombia, she was required by the American system to complete a bachelor's degree, which she did in Neuroscience and Molecular Biology at Brigham Young University. There she attained a perfect 4.0 average, graduated summa cum laude and served as Commencement speaker. With an NIH scholarship, she spent two years at the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases. She also spent a summer at the Mayo Clinic as a research fellow. To date, she has four co-authored publications in important scientific journals, including a recent publication in the journal Nature. While in Utah and Washington, DC, she not only volunteered with La Clinica del Pueblo but developed a course on Medical Spanish. Carolina intends to be both a clinician and a researcher. She sees medicine not only as a life style, but also a vocation. She also sees her career as providing a role model for the Hispanic community "whose youth is in particular need of role models and mentors in scientific and medical careers."

ANA MUNOZ is a first-year law student at Yale Law School. She completed her BA in history at Yale in 2004, graduating with honors and the Andrew White prize for her thesis on race politics on farm worker organizing. As an undergraduate, she co-founded a group to advocate for campaign finance reform and co-led another group, 2004 Forward, that trained organizers to register voters in eight battleground states during the summer of 2004. As an undergraduate, she was involved in organizing and advocating for labor unions employed by Yale University. She also wrote articles on politics and culture for the New Haven Advocateand the New Journal. After graduation, Ana spent several months in Arizona assisting immigrants and learning more about the difficulties of migration. Following a time organizing Oregonians to support John Kerry, she went to work for the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School. There she worked on projects relating to voter registration and election administration. Before starting law school, she became a field director for a Brennan Center project to end felony disenfranchisement. The project's efforts aided successful state coalition efforts to re-enfranchise voters in Rhode Island and Maryland (there are still people with felony convictions-namely those in prison, who are still disenfranchised). Ana wants a career that supports "democracy's ability to invest citizens in their communities and create a fair system of governance that allows for a peaceful and stable society." Now 25, Ana was born in the US to Colombian parents who are now naturalized US citizens.

DAVID NOAH is a second-year JD candidate at the Yale Law School. He is a 2003 graduate of the University of Chicago, where he earned a BA in history with honors and election to Phi Beta Kappa. He also holds an MA in teaching from Pace University, where he was assigned as part of the New York City Teaching Fellows program. David taught math, coached boys' basketball, and started his school's first high-school math program for 8th grade students. At Yale, David represents the rights of Connecticut school children as the student director of the Education Adequacy Clinic; he is currently preparing to argue an education-related state-constitutional case before the Connecticut Supreme Court. David has also co-founded a non-profit organization, College Acceptance, which pairs New Haven high school students with Yale mentors to help them navigate the college admissions process. The program now has over a hundred volunteers. These activities are in step with David's career aspiration to "change the way we (Americans) understand, and administer, public education." David has also worked in the New York City Department of Education and interned in the office of Chicago Mayor Richard Daley. Now 26 years old, David was born in Boston. His mother was born in Iraq, and grew up in Tehran; his father is from Greece. They arrived in America in the late 1960s, and are now both naturalized US citizens residing near New York City.

PAUL NUYUJUKIAN is currently in his second year at Stanford Medical School and expects to begin his PhD in Bioengineering in September. Paul went directly to Stanford from UCLA, where he received his BS in Cybernetics in 2006. At UCLA and now Stanford, Paul's work has been in the area of neuroengineering. His Stanford lab's most recent breakthrough came when they created one of the first systems for capturing neural data of freely-behaving organisms. Volunteering has been an important part of Paul's life. At UCLA, he began as a freshman in a student group that provided tutoring and mentoring for underprivileged children in downtown Los Angeles called CHAMPs. He later directed the group. At Stanford, through a Practicum in Community Health Interventions, Paul piloted a teen pregnancy prevention program at the East Palo Alto High School. Paul sees his career as one that will bridge the rift between doctors and engineers. Specifically, he aims to become a neurological research clinician and pursue a career in academic medicine. Now 23, Paul was born in Houston, Texas. His parents are of Armenian heritage, born and raised in Syria. Both are naturalized US citizens and reside in Yorba Linda, California.

MAXIM PINKOVSKIY is a senior majoring in economics at Columbia University. He plans to continue directly to a PhD program in economics. An accomplished essayist, Maxim has won a series of essay contests, including the Shenton Prize for the best paper in Columbia's Contemporary Civilization sequence, the Feigenbaum Prize for the best paper in Literature and Humanities, the Americanism Education League's Private Enterprise Essay Contest, and Holland and Knight's Holocaust Remembrance Project Essay Contest. His most extraordinary achievements, however, have been in his course work and research in mathematical economics. Beginning in his sophomore year, he began taking graduate level courses, and by his junior year was taking almost exclusively doctoral level courses in economics and statistics. Recognizing this ability, the New York Federal Reserve Bank selected him at the end of his sophomore year for a summer internship that had previously been awarded only to exceptional juniors. In contrast to most mathematically sophisticated economics students, however, Maxim's interests go well beyond theoretical economics modeling. He writes, "I wish to use economic tools to explore the reasons why individuals form and dissolve groups, and how they act within them. I am particularly interested in studying the way in which a group's capacity to use force against its members or third parties affects outcomes within a society..." Maxim, 21, was born in Leningrad/St. Petersburg, Russia, where he lived until he was seven, when his family, stimulated by the rise of overt anti-Semitism, moved to Brooklyn. They are naturalized US citizens.

KRISHNAN SUBRAHMANIAN is currently Border State Director of Obama for America, supplementing field efforts for the presidential campaign. He has deferred matriculation at Stanford's Medical School until the Fall of 2008. As an undergraduate at Harvard, he was elected President and first class Marshal of the class of 2003. He graduated magna cum laude with a major in Social Studies. While at Harvard he taught and then directed City Step, a program to empower children through the medium of dance. He also founded and directed the Cambridge Student Partnership, a student organization that connected needy Cambridge and Boston residents to community resources available to serve them. For three summers during these years, Krishnan served as a counselor and theater instructor at the Hole in the Wall Gang camp in Connecticut for children battling life-threatening diseases. That experience led to his being awarded a year-long Richardson Fellowship in Public Affairs, which he used to initiate a camp in southern Africa for orphans and children suffering from HIV/AIDS. After returning from South Africa, Krishnan joined Teach for America, under whose auspices he taught special needs high school students on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Building on his experience as a teacher, he received an MPhil in Education from Cambridge where he was a Gates Cambridge Scholar. Krishnan plans to study Community Medicine at Stanford and then to return to South Dakota to start a comprehensive community health center. Now 26, Krishnan was born in St. Paul, MN. His parents emigrated from India; and currently live in Texas. They are naturalized US citizens.

RIE TAKAHASHI is in the first year of her MD/PhD program at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine in Rochester, Minnesota. She received her bachelor's degree in microbiology, immunology, and molecular genetics from UCLA in December 2006, completing two honors theses (the first person in her major to do so at UCLA) and graduating cum laude. Rie served for three years in the lab of a UCLA professor, working in the area of ovarian cancer and the effects of stress on angiogenesis and tumor metastases. For this work, she is a co-author of articles in Nature Medicineand the Journal of Biological Chemistry. Her second honors thesis united her love of music, as an accomplished pianist, with her love of genetics, when she created a musical language for protein sequences, an achievement that received attention from newspapers, science magazines, and other media around the world. Called Gene2Music, the work was published in Genome Biology and given a special exhibit at the Boston Museum of Science. Competing with music has been her dedication as a volunteer, working with such organizations as the UCLA Mobile Clinic, Greater West Hollywood Food Coalition, Campamento Familiar and Camp Ronald McDonald. Rie intends to become a research scientist in a clinical setting doing research on molecular pathways involved in human diseases and overseeing their application to medical uses. Now 23, Rie was born in Yokohama, Japan and arrived at age two with her family to Ohio. Her father and sister are both US citizens; her mother is a permanent resident intending to apply for citizenship. Her parents live in Palos Verdes, California.

ELINA TETELBAUM is a first-year JD at Yale Law School. In 2007, she received her BA in economics, magna cum laude, from Harvard and graduated as a member of Phi Beta Kappa and a John Harvard Scholar. At Yale Law School, she has edited both the Yale Law and Policy Review and the Yale Journal on Regulation. She volunteers at the Housing Unit of New Haven Legal Assistance, providing legal services to low-income tenants in eviction proceedings. Inspired by her summer working on sentencing reform, she is now working directly with prisoners, helping prepare them to transition back into society. Outside of academia, she has sought first-hand knowledge of the practicalities of lawmaking, learning the realities of the system at the New York State Office of Court Administration, researching historical acts of collective violence at Facing History and Ourselves as a Steamboat Scholar, and interning with a forensic psychiatrist committed to ensuring nondiscrimination in criminal sentencing as a summer Arthur Liman fellow. With the psychiatrist, she aided in the development of the Depravity Scale, an empirically based instrument made to help develop a legal standard for "evil" crimes separate from background, race, or religious beliefs. At Harvard, she won the Judge Charles Wyzanski Prize for "concern for theoretical and practical issues of justice." Already declaring her presence nationally, her undergraduate thesis on the efficacy of minimum legal drinking laws was cited in The Atlantic Monthly and is a National Bureau of Economic Research Working paper. Elina's long-term goal is to become a judge. She is deeply interested in the relationship between the documents of law and the law's subsequent effect on those it rules. Born in Moscow in 1985, Elina currently resides with her mother and father in New York City. It took thirteen years for Elina to secure status as a permanent resident. She will be eligible for citizenship in 2010.

VIJAY YANAMADALA is a first-year student at Harvard Medical School in the Harvard/MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology (HST). He received his BA in Biochemical Sciences, magna cum laude, and an MA in Chemistry, both from Harvard University. In high school, while working on an environmental preservation project with the National Audubon Society, Vijay was awarded best of category and first place at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair 2002 for his work designing a successful filtration system for reducing phosphates and ammonia in lakes populated by pathogenic and toxic microorganisms. Since then, he has done research on other topics including synthetic organic chemistry, hypertension, and on the biochemical signaling pathways of G proteins and apoptosis in Polycystic Kidney Disease, the most common monogenic genetic disease in the world. This work has led to first-author publications in various journals, including the Journal of Biological Chemistry. At Harvard, Vijay also found time to be a teaching fellow, teaching in five courses and receiving several certificates of distinction. He was also active in cross-cultural organizations, serving as vice chairman of the Harvard Interfaith Council and founder-editor of a student journal on Hinduism, Swadharma. He twice received awards from the Harvard Foundation for contributions to intercultural and race relations. He also played in the Harvard Band and was part of the Commencement Ensemble in 2004 and 2005. Vijay's long term goal is to pursue a career in academic medicine, allowing him to combine his passion for research, teaching, and clinical care. As he explains, "physician-scientists are in a particularly important position at the crux between science and society." Now 21, Vijay was born in Dallas, Texas to parents who had emigrated from India. His parents are naturalized US citizens and live in Palos Verdes, California.

ALICE YANG graduated from Harvard in 2003 with a BA in biological anthropology. During college she directed a volunteer program that provided ESL instruction to more than 600 adults; interned at several non-profits, including Greater Boston Legal Services and the Cambridge Community Foundation; and wrote for Let's Go travel guides. She was the recipient of a Stride Rite Public Service Scholarship. After college Alice joined Partners In Health as research assistant to physician-anthropologist and co-founder Paul Farmer. She has prepared hundreds of presentations and publications, including a trilingual clinical manual on AIDS treatment in resource-poor settings; implemented research and programmatic initiatives in Haiti; assisted in securing major grants during a period of significant organizational growth; and now analyzes public-private management challenges at PIH's projects around the world. Alice plans to study business and public policy in order to advance collaboration among businesses, governments, non-profits, and universities. Now 27 and a naturalized citizen, Alice was born in Taiwan and also lived in the Netherlands before immigrating to the United States when she was seven. Her parents live in Taiwan; her mother is a naturalized US citizen.