Three Fellows Named “Great Immigrants” By Carnegie Corporation

Mehret Mandefro is an Ethiopian-American physician and anthropologist who produces visual ethnographies through her organization, Truth Aid—a film production firm which she co-founded and now leads. She uses her interdisciplinary training as the foundation to approach social issues she has chosen to tackle as an artist and filmmaker.  Truth Aid’s film Difret (available on Netflix) was the first film ever to win audience awards at both Sundance and Berlinale and its impact campaign is credited with helping to achieve policy reforms on the issue of child marriage globally. Mehret’s research uses clinical medicine, public health, anthropology, and film to examine the health outcomes of vulnerable populations and create what she calls “visual medicine.” She has led innovative research collaborations between academic, government, and relevant stakeholder organizations on an array of domestic and international health policy issues. Mehret has a BA from Harvard University, an MD from Harvard Medical School, and a MSc in Public Health from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine as a Fulbright Scholar. 

Mariano Castillo is an editor at the Associated Press and writer covering Latin America. His most recent project, Faces of a Divided Island, examines the immigration crisis in the Dominican Republic and the lessons it holds for US policymakers. He was born in Peru and his family moved to Texas when he was six. They are naturalized US citizens. Prior to the AP, Mariano was a writer and editor at CNN, where he pushed for mainstream coverage of under-reported stories such as the genocide trial of former Guatemalan dictator Efrain Rios Montt. As a newspaper correspondent along the US-Mexico border in the mid-2000s, his reporting focused on the drug war. Mariano received his master’s in international affairs program at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) in 2009. In 2002, he graduated from Texas A&M University with a degree in journalism and international studies. 

Fei-Fei Li is a leading expert on artificial intelligence. She was born in Beijing, China and lived in Chengdu, China until she was 16, when her family immigrated to the United States. She is the director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab and the Stanford Vision lab, in addition to her role as an associate professor at the Computer Science Department at Stanford University. As the creator of ImageNet, she has pioneered large-scale computer image recognition—a project she gave a TED talk on in 2015. Fei-Fei is also the leader of the SAIL-Toyota Center for AI Research, which focuses on computer information processing, intelligent robotics and autonomous cars. Fei-Fei has published more than 100 scientific articles in top-tier journals and conferences, including Nature, PNAS, Journal of Neuroscience, CVPR, ICCV, NIPS and many more. Research from Fei-Fei’s lab has been featured in New York Times, New Scientists and a number of popular press magazines and newspapers. Fei-Fei is a recipient of the 2014 IBM Faculty Fellow Award, 2011 Alfred Sloan Faculty Award, 2012 Yahoo Labs FREP award, 2009 NSF CAREER award, the 2006 Microsoft Research New Faculty Fellowship and a number of Google Research awards. She received her PhD degree from California Institute of Technology, and a BS in physics from Princeton University. ∎