Fellow Highlights and News

Introducing the 2025 Paul & Daisy Soros Public Voices Fellows

April 30, 2025

The Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans, in partnership with The OpEd Project, are happy to announce the 2025 Public Voices Fellows. The year-long fellowship will provide a cohort of twenty Paul & Daisy Soros Fellows with extraordinary support, leadership skills, and knowledge to ensure their ideas shape not only their fields, but also the greater public conversations of our age. 

Learn about the Fellows here: 

Alice Michelle Augustine, 2006 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow

Alice Michelle Augustine is a Bronx resident with roots in the Commonwealth of Dominica. She has served in many capacities as an educator in the Bronx since 1999 and is currently the Founding Director of Campus Honors and Scholar Engagement at Lehman College.      

At Lehman College, Michelle first created the Office of Prestigious Awards in 2016 to change student perception and campus culture around nationally competitive awards, scholar engagement and development. She developed campus structures and resources for students seeking scholarly experiences that led to the college receiving national recognitions including top producer of Fulbright and Gilman scholars and Fulbright HSI leader designations.    

Michelle’s current leadership role led to the recentering of the Honor’s Program’s mission at Lehman College on community-based scholarship. This recentering inspired her work on the “Bronx as our Classroom” Initiative and the “Hidden Histories Project” in the Bronx. The Bronx as our Classroom Initiative centers Bronx related topics, histories, spaces, people and ideas as the focal point of scholar development in the Honors Program. She loves above all the Hidden Histories Project which she developed with her students, peers and community partners in the last three years. Michelle created this project by inviting her students and peers to interact with the Enslaved African Burial Ground at Van Cortlandt Park and invest in uncovering the histories enslaved Africans in the Bronx. The project encourages critical literacy development and historical consciousness by uncovering deliberately concealed Black histories of the land that now comprises the Bronx. Michelle was recognized in 2018 for her outstanding contributions to Lehman College. She credits her ability to build community with her students in transformative ways, to the legacy of excellence, love, community and care of the land she inherited from her ancestors.  

Amy Chen, 2004 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow

Amy Chen is the chief operating officer of UPSIDE Foods, the world’s leading cultivated meat company, which is focused on growing delicious meat directly from animal cells. As COO, Amy leads the brand’s global strategy and commercial functions, including sales and marketing, finance and operations, product development, food safety and public policy. She’s also helping scale the company’s culture as it enters this next phase, following the US FDA green light for UPSIDE Foods’ cultivated meat. Prior to joining UPSIDE Foods, Amy was senior vice president for PepsiCo Beverages North America. She previously served as the chief marketing officer for PepsiCo Snacks in the Greater China Region, in addition to other sales, operations, strategy and innovation roles. She has an M.B.A. and a JD from Stanford University.    

Amy was born in Chicago, IL. Her parents, who are of Taiwanese origins, are both naturalized citizens and live in Round Rock, TX.    

Amy received a BA in chemistry from Harvard University, where she graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa and delivered the Harvard Oration at her Class Day Commencement Exercises.     

At Harvard University, she was president of the Harvard Model Congress, the nation’s largest government simulation program for high school students, and co-founded the Harvard Political Education Program for local at-risk youth. At Stanford she was the Managing Editor of the Stanford Law and Policy Review and the Project Manager of the Stanford Affordable Housing Team.    

After graduation, she worked as a management consultant at McKinsey & Company, Inc. in New York City and then at the US Interagency Council on Homelessness in Washington, DC. She was then a brand manager for Stacy’s Pita Chips.     

Anis Barmada, 2022 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow

Anis Barmada is currently an MD/PhD candidate in immunobiology at Yale University, where he is integrating both experimental and computational tools to advance translational medicine. His most current research explores methods for and applications of improved mouse modeling of human immune responses to enhance translational/clinical discovery.

A Gates Cambridge and Barry Goldwater Scholar, Anis has led biomedical research studies in many peer-reviewed publications and conference presentations. At the University of Illinois Chicago, he double majored in chemistry and biological sciences, earning highest distinction in both, and minored in mathematics, and he was selected for the Riddle Prize as the most outstanding graduate across the university. At the University of Cambridge, he pursued an MPhil in genomic medicine, graduating with distinction, while conducting research at the Wellcome Sanger Institute. In 2025, Anis was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in science. Anis also hopes to contribute to a new era of health care without disparities. Among other efforts, he has led the implementation of new curricular sessions for all first- and second-year medical students at the Yale School of Medicine. Outside of his academic work, Anis is passionate about science communication, and he has contributed opinion pieces on various topics in media outlets such as Scientific American, Daily Herald, and The Scholar.

Arjun Chopra, 2003 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow

Arjun Chopra is a partner at Floodgate and leads the firm’s investments in opportunities that transform the “IT stack” in ways that help companies change the way they do business and compete.    

Before Floodgate, Arjun was the CTO at Cambridge Technology Enterprises (CTE), a publicly traded cloud computing company, where he launched and led their cloud strategy, products and services. He was a member of the board and executive team that raised multiple rounds of financing and spun out smartShift Inc., where he was the founding CTO.    

He led 350+ engineers and team members, built and on-boarded hundreds of projects for large and small companies alike (including production systems on Amazon Web Services (AWS) for 10 of the top 20 Global financial institutions), ran multiple development and operations centers, managed over 200M hours of uptime in the public cloud and was recognized as one of AWS’ top 22 partners world-wide. Arjun joined CTE when they acquired his Open Source startup, Vox Holdings.    

Arjun holds multiple technology patents that have been cited as prior art by firms like Apple, AT&T and iRobot. He has also held several technology development and management positions in consumer and enterprise software companies including Microsoft, Motive and IBCC.    

Arjun graduated with special honors and highest honors (summa cum laude) with a BS in computer sciences from The University of Texas at Austin, where he was an endowed presidential scholar and a recipient of the Vice President of Research Fellowship. He also has an MBA from Harvard Business School, where he was one of 32 nation-wide PD Soros Fellows.

Aya Saed, 2016 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow

Aya Saed is a Sudanese-American attorney, policy strategist, and writer at the intersection of technology, governance, and sustainability. As director of AI policy at Scope3, she addresses the environmental implications of emerging technologies. Previously, she served as counsel and legislative director for Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, where she managed the Congresswoman’s policy portfolio and led her work on the bipartisan AI Taskforce, including the development of AI legislation.   

Her experience also includes roles as an attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights and policy advisor to Congresswoman Cori Bush. Aya holds a JD from Harvard Law School and a master’s in public policy from Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs, following her magna cum laude graduation from the University of Pennsylvania in International Relations. Beyond her policy work, she is completing her debut novel, Daughters of the Nile, represented by Janklow & Nesbit.

Camilo Romero, 2010 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow

Camilo A. Romero is co-founder of ReGeneración (www.regeneracion.co), a peace-building initiative, launched in Colombia and now operating globally, committed to healing intergenerational trauma through “Cuál es tu Paz?” children’s books, story-healing workshops, and cultural celebrations like the “Poderosas” project (@regeneracion.poderosas).

Camilo teaches law at Santa Ana College focused on healing justice. He has led international delegations in Chocó, Colombia as legal director of the National Farmworker Association, organized student and consumer campaigns as a labor union organizer for the Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores in North America & Europe, and designed know-your-rights trainings as legal coordinator for Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles, California. Camilo received his BA in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley as a Gates Millennium Scholar and published two honors theses, one on the politics of salsa music. Camilo received his JD from New York University School of Law where he graduated as a Root-Tilden-Kern Scholar and a Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow. Camilo is also a graduate of the Trial Lawyers College.   

He currently serves on the executive board of NYU Law’s Alumni Association (LACA) and is a New American Leaders Fellow. Camilo volunteers as a youth basketball coach and, by the grace of God or the internet, is also a licensed minister. 

Most importantly, Camilo is the older brother of two forgiving sisters and a proud uncle.

Cecilia Ballí, 2002 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow

Cecilia Ballí is a writer and journalist who has been writing for magazines for more than twenty years. In 2000, she became the first Latina or Latino writer at Texas Monthly, where she published longform stories and essays as a writer-at-large. She has written extensively about Tejano history and culture, immigration, the sexual killing of young women in Ciudad Juárez, U.S.-Mexican border drug violence, and Mexican military disappearances and torture, among other subjects. She has also published stories in The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s Magazine, and Columbia Journalism Review. She began her journalism career as a high school senior writing for her hometown newspaper, The Brownsville Herald, and later worked as an education reporter for the San Antonio Express-News.    

Cecilia is also a cultural anthropologist who taught for six years as an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin. She has conducted ethnographic fieldwork on Tejano and norteño musical culture and intra-ethnic tension between Mexicans and Mexican Americans; gendered violence on the border and the sexual killing of young women; US-Mexico border enforcement and the border wall; and Latino voting and civic engagement. In 2014, she left academia to focus on reporting and writing. She has since served as a Professor of Practice at the University of Texas at San Antonio’s College of Liberal and Fine Arts; a Visiting Scholar at the University of Houston’s Center for Mexican American and Latino/a Studies, and a Research Associate at the University of Texas at Austin’s Humanities Institute.    

As a writer, Cecilia has held artist residencies with the Lannan Foundation, the Headlands Center for the Arts and the Lanesboro Arts Center, and she was the 2014-2015 Jesse H. Jones Dobie Paisano Fellow with the Texas Institute of Letters. In previous years, she was a finalist for the Livingston Awards for Young Journalists and was named Emerging Journalist of the Year by the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. Her stories and essays have appeared in multiple anthologies, including The Best American Crime Writing; Hecho en Tejas: An Anthology of Texas Mexican Literature; and Puro Border: Dispatches, Snapshots & Graffiti from La Frontera.    

In 2018, Cecilia launched Culture Concepts, a creative and strategic consultancy focused on ethnographic research, cultural analysis and storytelling. She continues to write for various publications. Her latest story for The New York Times Magazine, “A Championship Season in Mariachi Country,” chronicled a season of competition in Starr County, on the Texas-Mexico border, among the nation’s three top-ranked high school mariachis. Cecilia is writing a narrative nonfiction book inspired by the story, titled Mariachi Dreams, for Henry Holt, an imprint of MacMillan Publishers.    

Cecilia holds a BA in American studies and Spanish from Stanford University and a PhD in cultural anthropology from Rice University. The daughter of former migrant farmworkers, she grew up regularly crossing the Brownsville/Matamoros border and is a proud tejana and fronteriza. She’s roamed throughout Texas much of her life, but currently calls San Antonio home.

Chimène Keitner, 2001 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow

Chimène Keitner is Martin Luther King, Jr. professor of law at the University of California Davis School of Law. She has taught at law schools including UC Berkeley, the University of Southern California, and UC Law San Francisco. Chimène has authored two books and dozens of articles, essays, and book chapters on questions surrounding the relationship among law, communities, and borders. She is a frequent contributor to legal blogs including Lawfare and Just Security. In 2005, Chimène served as co-counsel with the ACLU and Human Rights First in a lawsuit against senior US officials responsible for the government’s torture program in Iraq and Afghanistan. She later served as the 27th counselor on international law in the US Department of State. Among other professional service, she has served as co-chair of the American Society of International Law’s International Law in Domestic Courts Interest Group and co-chair of the International Law Association’s Study Group on Individual Responsibility in International Law. She is a member of the ASIL Executive Council, the ILA Committee on Comparative Diplomatic and Consular Immunities, and the American Law Institute. She holds a bachelor’s degree in history and literature from Harvard, a doctorate in international relations from Oxford, and a JD from Yale.

Eugene Mazo, 2003 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow

Eugene Mazo, a nationally recognized scholar of election law, is associate professor of law and political science at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Eugene writes about the theory and practice of democracy, both in the United States and around the world. His books include “The Oxford Handbook of American Election Law” (Oxford 2024), “The Best Candidate: Presidential Nomination in Polarized Times” (Cambridge 2020), “Democracy by the People: Reforming Campaign Finance in America” (Cambridge 2018) and “Election Law Stories” (Foundation Press, 2016). At Duquesne, he holds a joint appointment at the Thomas R. Kline School of Law and in the McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts.    

Eugene has chaired the Section on Election Law at the Association of American Law Schools (AALS), where he played an instrumental role in creating the John Hart Ely Prize in the Law of Democracy and the Distinguished Scholarship Award in Election Law, the two most prominent awards in his field. He also serves on the executive committee of the Section on Constitutional Law. Eugene has long been a scholar of the democratic process. He was a post-doctoral scholar and research fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), an affiliated scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), and a visiting researcher at the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies (CREEES), all at Stanford University. He has been awarded grants for his research by the Social Science Research Council and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and he is a past recipient of the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans.     

Eugene name has often been cited in the media, appearing in publications such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Financial Times, and Politico. He has been a guest blogger for Prawfsblawg and can be found ruminating about democracy on Twitter. His articles are available on the Social Science Research Network. Eugene has taught at several law schools in the United States, including Baltimore, George Mason, Maryland, Rutgers, Seton Hall, and Wake Forest.    

A graduate of Columbia College, he received a master’s degree from Harvard, his doctorate in politics from Oxford, and a law degree from Stanford.

Flip Tanedo, 2010 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow

Theoretical physicist Philip (Flip) Tanedo is an associate professor at the University of California, Riverside. His research seeks to determine the fundamental physics of dark matter. He is a 2021 NSF CAREER award winner and a 2020 Hellman Fellow.    

He received his PhD at Cornell University as a National Science Foundation graduate research fellow and a recipient of the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans. His thesis focused on weakly coupled descriptions of strong dynamics and explained the finiteness of brane-localized dipole operators in theories of extra dimensions. He completed his postdoctoral work at the University of California, Irvine as a Chancellor’s ADVANCE postdoctoral fellow. Flip grew up in Los Angeles and is a proud product of the Los Angeles Unified School District. He earned his bachelor’s degree in physics and mathematics with honors and distinction from Stanford University. As a Marshall Scholar, he completed Part III of the Mathematical Tripos at Cambridge University and a masters degree in physics at the Institute for Particle Physics Phenomenology at Durham University. 

Flip was appointed to serve as the theory/cosmic frontier liaison for the 2021 Snowmass Community Planning Exercise. He is the first Filipino-American professor of physics. At UCR he is an equity advisor for the College of Natural and Agricultural Sciences. He led UCR’s team in the American Physical Society’s Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity Alliance, co-created and advises the university’s Physics Organization for Women and the Under-Represented. He was recognized with a 2020 commitment to graduate diversity award by the UCR graduate division, a 2021 Junior Excellence in Teaching Award from the UCR Academy of Distinguished Teaching, and a 2023 Adviser of the Year award from the UCR Office of Student Life. He has appeared on Nova, Science Friday, and Ologies.

Ismael Loera, 2015 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow

Ismael Loera is the director of people & culture at Room to Grow, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting families raising children in low-income circumstances during the critical early years of life. With a background in educational operations, human resources, and public policy, Ismael has worked extensively in the nonprofit and education sectors, shaping policies that foster equity, inclusion, and opportunity. Previously, he served as the director of operations at The Equity Project (TEP) Charter School and held various leadership roles at Achievement First, where he drove strategic initiatives to improve organizational health, enrollment, and staff retention. A former educator, Ismael brings a deep understanding of systemic challenges in education and workforce development. He is a Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow and holds graduate degrees from Rice University and Relay Graduate School of Education.

Jenna Nicholas, 2016 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow

Jenna Nicholas is an investor, entrepreneur, advisor, coach and speaker.     

She is the president of Enlightened Bottomline, an investment and advisory firm. She is also  the co-founder and CEO of Impact Experience which is focused on addressing equity across climate, healthcare, education and investments. Jenna is also the Investment Partner of One Planet Group and previously led Corporate Development for One Planet Group which incubates, operates and invests in businesses.     

Jenna is also an active angel investor and has invested in over three unicorns including Lyft, Virta Health and Esusu. Jenna has worked with the World Bank Treasury on green bonds and other sustainability projects and with Toniic helping to support an impact investing community.  She has worked closely with the Calvert Special Equities team, actively investing in companies and funds in the areas of education technology, financial inclusion, renewable energy, and sustainable agriculture. She previously led Divest-Invest Philanthropy, a coalition of foundations shifting capital from investments in fossil fuels and reinvesting in new economy solutions. Jenna spoke at TedX Portland about this work. She is an advisor to the Nexus Global Youth Summit and Ethic, an online impact investing platform.     

Jenna graduated from Stanford University with an International Relations Honors Degree during which time she also read International Development at Oxford University. Jenna is a Stanford Graduate School of Business MBA graduate, a PD Soros Fellow for New Americans, recipient of the Stanford Social Innovation Fellowship, an Echoing Green Fellow, Forbes 30 under 30 for Social Entrepreneurship, a Summit fellow, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a coach for the Roddenberry Foundation and a Young Leaders Council member of Milken Institute. She has also served on the Investment Committee of the Wayfarer Foundation. Jenna also served on the Impact Advisory Committee for Apollo Global Management. Jenna co-taught a course at Tsinghua School of Economics and Management in Beijing, China on Business Ethics, Sustainability, and Impact Investing. Jenna also co-chaired the Emerging Leaders Council of LISC, a community development finance institution that has invested over $1.5 billion into community development projects. Jenna is the Vice President of Stanford Angels and Entrepreneurs, a community of over 1500 entrepreneurs and investors. She is an active member of the Bahá’í Faith.

Jermaine Anthony Richards, 2023 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow

Jermaine Anthony Richards, born and raised in New York City to Jamaican immigrant parents, bridges art, digital technology, and social advocacy.    

A third-generation CUNY graduate with a BS in communications technology and studio art, Jermaine later produced interactive experiences for global brands at Wieden+Kennedy before earning his MSc in Global Media at the London School of Economics and Political Science as an Advertising Club of New York Presidential Scholar. He subsequently completed an MA in Global Communication at the University of Southern California (USC) as an Annenberg Research Scholar, investigating cyber-biosecurity and critical infrastructure during the COVID-19 pandemic.    

Currently pursuing a PhD in communication at USC’s Annenberg School, Jermaine specializes in the aesthetics, ethics, and politics of game-based advocacy. His research examines video games as strategic tools for managing global risk and political crises, complemented by a Science and Technology Studies certificate integrating post-rational thinking with computational approaches to social advocacy.   

His professional experience spans public, private, and nonprofit sectors. As a New America Fellow, he led research on digital transformation in the Lower Mekong Region. His most influential work includes producing Hair Nah, a video game that helped shape national discourse on anti-hair discrimination legislation. This work has been exhibited at prestigious institutions, including the Smithsonian, and is taught at leading universities globally.    

Beyond his research and creative work, Jermaine is founding a cross-sectoral advocacy innovation studio while occasionally finding time for his bass guitar and drums–and writing about how developing a gamer’s orientation opens the aperture on what is achievable and modifiable in the real world.

Julie Zhu, 2015 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow

Julie Zhu is a composer and carillonist based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where she is an assistant professor of performing arts technology at the University of Michigan. Her music has been featured on Radio France’s Création Mondiale and at various institutions such as GMEM Festival Propagations Marseille, IRCAM Paris, ICST Zürich, Sansusī Latvia, Tetramatyka Lviv, Carnegie Hall, among others.    

Julie’s research on music and AI focuses on the project Deep Drawing, which tests the machine’s capabilities for bringing the intricate noises of drawing and writing to visual life. In 2025, Neuma Records will release her first composer portrait album as swiftly and fading as soon, comprised of all of her carillon oeuvre performed by Carson Landry and other compositions inspired by the sound of bells performed by JACK quartet, Variant6, and the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players.    

Julie is currently working on a virtual reality opera titled Talking Pupils with co-director and immersive designer Aoshuang Zhang.  Based a Chinese ghost story, the ambisonics work centers on the experience of the visually impaired. Together, they lead a team of choreographers, musicians, and researchers who are designing a haptic cane, as part of an Arts Initiative grant at the University of Michigan.    

As a carillonist, Julie regularly performs on the Burton and Lurie Tower at the University of Michigan and concertizes in the summer. During her time as a visual artist in New York City, she was the resident carillonneur at Saint Thomas Church Fifth Avenue.    

Julie holds degrees in music composition (DMA Stanford), visual arts (MFA Hunter College), carillon performance (Licentiate Royal Carillon School ‘Jef Denyn’), and mathematics (BA Yale).  

Leen Katrib, 2016 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow

Leen Katrib is an architectural designer and assistant professor of architecture at University of Kentucky.     

Leen was born in Dubai and raised in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates to Arab immigrants—a Syrian father and a Palestinian-Lebanese mother whose family was expelled from Haifa during the 1948 Nakba. Her memory of the architectural, economic, and social inequalities that plagued immigrant communities in a rapidly urbanizing UAE—against the backdrop of her mother’s history of forced displacement from Lebanon and Palestine—shaped her focus in architecture and urbanism. After numerous threats of deportation to Syria, she relocated with her family to West Virginia when she was 14 years old to pursue permanent legal presence for the first time.   

Leen’s work investigates architecture’s materiality and historiography and designs new frameworks for marginalized communities, histories, and material culture. Her research has been supported by an Art Omi Architecture Residency (2024), MacDowell / National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (2022), Harry der Boghosian Fellowship (2021-22), Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship (2016-18), Howard Crosby Butler Travel Grant (2017), William and Neoma Timme Travel Grant (2014), and George H. Mayr Travel Grant (2013). Her work has been published in Deem, Future Anterior, Pidgin, Room One Thousand, Bracket, and various conference proceeding, and has been exhibited at Lexington Art League’s Loudoun House, Syracuse University, Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism, Van Der Plas Gallery, and the A+D Museum. Leen has presented her work at venues throughout North America and Europe and served as a guest critic for graduate and undergraduate reviews at several institutions including American University of Sharjah, Columbia University, Cornell University, Georgia Institute of Technology, Indiana University Columbus, Kent State University, Princeton University, Texas A&M University, The Ohio State University, UC Berkeley, and University of Arkansas. Prior to academia, Leen lived in New York City and practiced at Marvel, LTL Architects, Peter Marino, and OMA—with built work in New York, Pittsburgh, Paris, and Hong Kong. She holds a M.Arch from Princeton University, where she was editor of Pidgin and an Assistant Instructor, and a B.Arch from the University of Southern California, where she was designated a Global and Discovery Scholar and during which she interned for the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Gensler, and MADA s.p.a.m.    

Outside of teaching and practice, Leen regularly volunteers for community service—most recently as an ESL and academic mentor for immigrants and refugees through the Jusoor Academic Mentorship Program and Literacy Volunteers of Kanawha County West Virginia, and previously through New York Cares and Habitat for Humanity NYC.

Maria Pia Rodriguez Salazar, 2020 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow

Maria Pia Rodriguez Salazar was born in Bolivia to Peruvian parents and spent her childhood in Peru with her family. When she was ten, economic hardship in Peru drove her parents to make the difficult decision to immigrate to the United States, but unforeseen events rendered Pia and her family undocumented. As a young undocumented immigrant, Pia saw her parents work multiple minimum wage jobs to support her family. She quickly learned that many undocumented students in the US dropout of high school and do not pursue higher education due to overwhelming financial and professional barriers.  Despite these difficulties and with a growing interest in science, Pia earned a full scholarship to UNC-Chapel Hill, allowing her to pursue her bachelor’s degree in biology. During her time at UNC, Pia became a leader in undocumented student advocacy and has remained committed to mentoring minoritized students in and out of the university setting.  

After graduating from UNC, Pia joined the Regenerative Medicine Lab at United Therapeutics after receiving DACA, which finally allowed her to pursue a career as a scientist. Here, she was one of the lead researchers to study and develop a novel stem cell-based therapy for chronic lung disease. Currently, Pia is a PhD candidate at Duke University in the laboratory of Professor Cagla Eroglu, where she is investigating the role of astrocyte mitochondrial function in brain development. During her graduate training, Pia became a 2020 PD Soros Fellow, a 2021 HHMI Gilliam Fellow, co-chaired the Duke’s Cell Biology DEI Committee from 2020-2023, and was awarded the Duke University Chancellor’s Award for Research Excellence in 2023. After completing her PhD, Pia hopes to return to the biotech space to lead the development of therapies for currently untreatable developmental diseases. Furthermore, Pia aims to continue to use her voice and experiences as an immigrant scientist to maximize access and equity in scientific research environments and beyond.

Mariangela Lisanti, 2007 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow

Mariangela Lisanti is a professor of physics at Princeton University and a research scientist in the Center for Computational Astrophysics at the Flatiron Institute.  

She is a theoretical astroparticle physicist studying the nature of dark matter. Her work is highly interdisciplinary and often crosses the boundary between particle and astrophysics, incorporating ideas from data science as well. Mariangela helped to pioneer the use of simplified models in LHC searches, proposed new experimental directions for direct detection experiments, and developed novel analysis methods to study signals of dark matter annihilation in gamma rays.  Most recently, she has been harnessing data from astrophysical surveys to probe the fundamental nature of dark matter and map its distribution in the Milky Way.   

Mariangela received her BA summa cum laude from Harvard in 2005 and her PhD from Stanford in 2010. After completing a postdoctoral fellowship at the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science in 2013, she joined the Princeton faculty. In recent years, Mariangela received a Sloan Research Fellowship, Cottrell Scholar Award, Simons Investigator Award, and the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton.

Mohamed Ismail, 2020 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow

Mohamed Ismail is an assistant professor of architecture at the University of Virginia School of Architecture and the director of the Open Structures Research group. Open Structures advances structural design and contextual fabrication methods that may enable sustainable global development. 

Mohamed received his PhD in Building Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and his dissertation, entitled “Reshaping concrete: Empowering development through low-carbon structures,” engaged nonprofit organizations, industry partners, and a global network of academics to design and develop low-cost, low-carbon structural components for housing in developing regions like Kenya, India, and Mexico.      

Mohamed has taught classes in construction systems, visual representation, parametric workflows, and structural design at UVA, Northeastern University and MIT. In addition to his doctorate, Mohamed holds an undergraduate degree in Civil Engineering from Duke University, a Master of Architecture degree from the UVA School of Architecture, and a Master of Science in Architecture Studies in Building Technology from MIT.  His award-winning graduate thesis explored an urban vernacular building language for residential architecture in Khartoum, Sudan, that utilized form-finding optimization technologies while carefully integrating local resources, empowering local labor, and advancing local skillsets.    

In 2017 and 2019, Mohamed was named a Fellow of the MIT Tata Center for Technology and Design and a MIT Presidential Fellow, respectively, and was awarded a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans in 2020. In 2022, with his PhD advisor Professor Caitlin Mueller, he received an ACSA Diversity Achievement Award. Throughout his academic studies, he has held leadership roles especially in service to advancing justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion.

Natalie Jesionka, 2014 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow

Natalie Jesionka writes about food, community, and social impact and is the co-author of the best selling cookbook Kalaya’s Southern Thai Table (Clarkson Potter, 2024). Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, Toronto Star, National Post, Canadian Press, Philadelphia Magazine and Forbes. She served as a Fulbright scholar in Northern Thailand and is a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow for New Americans.   

Tania Fabo, 2022 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow

Tania Fabo was born in Hamburg, Germany to two Cameroonian immigrant parents who had grown up in Nkongsamba, Cameroon, where they developed a love for science, math, and engineering—a love which brought them to Germany for graduate school and a love which they would later share with their children. When Tania was seven, she moved with her parents and little sister to Massachusetts. While Tania fed a nascent love for science with books and documentaries, her parents restarted their lives from scratch, experiencing xenophobia and racism. Despite this, Tania’s parents supported and encouraged her, watching NOVA documentaries, and working through difficult math problems with her before their night shifts.     

Tania’s love for science ultimately led her to an undergraduate degree at Harvard University, where she majored in human developmental and regenerative biology. After reading Siddartha Mukherjee’s Emperor of All Maladies her freshman year, Tania became particularly interested in cancer and the diverse array of intrinsic and extrinsic factors which can impact its pathophysiology. She began working in the lab of Professor Leonard Zon, where she ultimately completed her senior thesis on the role of the transcription factor CDK13 in metastatic melanoma.     

As her college years progressed, Tania also learned more about the realities of systemic racism and its far-reaching impacts and became passionate about understanding drivers of health disparities and, particularly, how these drivers can impact the underlying mechanisms of diseases like cancer. In her junior year, she created the Black Health Matters Conference, which aimed to shed light on the disparities in health that affect Black people. After graduation, Tania was awarded the Rhodes Scholarship for study at Oxford University, where she pursued an MSc in medical anthropology and an MSc by research in oncology .        

Tania is now an MD/PhD student at Stanford, where she has been awarded the Knight-Hennessy Scholarship. For her PhD in genetics, Tania is working in the lab of Professor Paul Khavari where her research focuses on gene-environment interactions in colorectal cancer, with a particular focus on the environments that marginalized groups are disproportionately exposed to. Her ultimate goal as a physician-scientist is to challenge the traditional separation of the scientific and the social, and to instead integrate these two fields to uncover how people’s lived experiences, and the societal structures that they are situated in, affect the pathophysiology and mechanisms of disease.