Student Selection Process

For the 2010 round, there were about 900 applications from 297 undergraduate and 140 graduate institutions. Candidates applied from the whole spectrum of graduate fields -- professional and academic, from creative writing and voice to medicine and neuroscience. They represented 162 different national origins, an astonishing number when it is realized that there are only 192 countries in the United Nations! Not only did they hail from 162 different national origins, but many represented oppressed minorities -- Hmong, Mien, Chaldeans, Jews, Armenians, Overseas Chinese, Overseas Indians, Parsees, Copts, Baha'is, Ismalis, Melkite Christians, etc., etc.

On this website under "Current Fellows," the 384 individuals who received the Fellowship are briefly profiled. It may be helpful, however, to look at profiles below of five Fellows so that potential applicants can see the range of backgrounds and career trajectories successful Fellows have.

RONALD WAKIM ALFA intends a career as a physician/scientist where his emphasis will be on applications alongside discovery. He is in his second year of the MSTP (Medical Science Training Program) at Stanford University, where he will receive both MD and PhD degrees. Now 28, he was born into a family of refugees from Lebanon. Beginning at a Los Angeles community college, he received his BSc, summa cum laude, in animal physiology and neurosciences from the University of California at San Diego; he also received an MA in History of Medicine from the University of London, where he was supported by the Wellcome Trust. A subsequent essay he wrote on the origins of the placebo effect received the William Osler Medal in 2008 by the American Association of the History of Medicine.

CAREL ALÉ intends a career as a public prosecutor using prosecution as a tool for social change. Since receiving coterminous BA and MA in Latin American studies from UCLA, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and graduated magna cum laude, she is now a first year JD student at Yale Law School. At UCLA, she founded and was president of the university's Make-A-Wish Foundation chapter, organized volunteer tutors at Jordan High School in Watts and was active in the campus Darfur Action Committee. Carel's research and thesis focused on the philosophical and ideological underpinnings of the Mexican Revolution and its manifestations within the governance of the Partído Revolucionario Institucional. She has also done extensive work on Caribbean female migration. Carel interned at the California Lieutenant Governor's office and Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund where she headed a national research initiative addressing issues of higher education for undocumented students. Among other activities at Yale, she contributed to the writing of an amicus brief for a Louisiana death row inmate. Now 22, she was born in Mexico City to Mexican and Cuban parents and then moved to southern California when she was a young girl. Her family lives in Anaheim, CA.

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). In 2002, he graduated from Texas A&M University with a degree in journalism and international studies. At Texas A&M University, 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 29 years ago in Lima, Peru. The family moved to Texas when he was six. They are naturalized US citizens.

ADEL ELSOHLY intends a career in drug discovery and development, where his research will focus on chemotherapeutic agents. To that end, he is a second-year PhD candidate in chemistry at Columbia University as a National Science Foundation Pre-doctoral Fellow. He completed his BS in pharmaceutical sciences and mathematics with election to Phi Beta Kappa and his MS in chemistry at the University of Mississippi. He held the Barry M. Goldwater scholarship. Based on his research during college and later at Columbia, he has first-author publications in the Journal of American Chemical Society and the International Journal of Quantum Chemistry. At both the University of Mississippi and Columbia, he has been an active member of the Muslim-American community. Now 25, he was born in Oxford, MS, the child of parents who emigrated from Egypt, are now naturalized citizens and live in Oxford, MS.

AYIRINI FONSECA-SABUNE believes that effective education reform must be based in the courtroom as well as the classroom. Therefore, she will be attending Harvard Law School next year. Now 26, she was born in the US to a family where her father emigrated from Uganda and her mother from Guyana. Her parents, both naturalized citizens, live in Dobbs Ferry, NY. As an undergraduate at Harvard University, where she received her BA cum laude, with high honors in social studies, she served as president of Phillips Brooks House Association, a student run nonprofit public service organization. After graduation, she worked with incarcerated women on Rikers Island, NY and with the NYC Civilian Complaint Review Board investigating police misconduct. After a year teaching in Uganda as a Rockefeller Fellow, she spent two years as a member of the New York City Teaching Fellows program, where she taught twelfth grade in Brooklyn. She is now supporting the community health training program in a rural district of Rwanda with Partners in Health.

RICARDO GONZALEZ RUBIO completes his second-year as a PhD candidate in biomedical engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He holds a BSc in physics, summa cum laude, from the City College of New York (CCNY), where he was also elected to Phi Beta Kappa. As an undergraduate, Ricardo worked with molecular nanomagnets and also investigated how students try to learn and understand Newton's Third Law. At Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he has worked as a research and technical assistant at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Ricardo's lab work focused on the development of an X-ray guided neurosurgery system for small animals. Ricardo envisions a career in research and teaching. Now 27, Ricardo was born in the Dominican Republic, where he lived until 2002, when a limited availability of physics programs prompted him to move to the United States. Ricardo is a green card holder.

JANINE JOSEPH is developing a career as a poet and teacher. To this end, she is a first-year PhD candidate in literature and creative writing at the University of Houston. This program follows her MFA in poetry from New York University and her BA in creative writing, summa cum laude with upper division honors, from the University of California at Riverside. A Kundiman fellow, her poems have appeared in such journals and anthologies as Third Coast, Spoon River Poetry Review, Nimrod International Journal, Fugue, Calabash, and Breathe: 101 Contemporary Odes, among others. She is currently working on a larger book-length project, presently titled Human Archipelago, which focuses on the often untold experiences of undocumented immigrants. Now 26, she was born in Metro Manila, Philippines and came to the US with her family when she was eight. She is a green card holder.

YANIV SEGAL intends a career as a musician and conductor. Already at Vassar College, where he earned his BA in music, he began to assemble musicians to play as an ensemble. After graduating from Vassar, Yaniv put the same skills to work creating a New York music cooperative, the Chelsea Symphony. By allowing members to train as soloists and conductors in exchange for playing regularly in the orchestra, the Chelsea Orchestra (now in its third full season) has managed to perform some twenty concerts per season, free of charge, at a consistently high level. Now, as a first-year MM candidate in orchestral conducting at the University of Michigan at Ann-Arbor he is continuing to pursue his goal. Yaniv is 27, born in New York to parents who emigrated from Poland and Israel. His parents are naturalized citizens and reside in Yonkers, NY.