• Awards and Recognition

Three Fellows Named “Great Immigrants” By Carnegie Corporation

Paul & Daisy Soros recipients Fei-Fei Li (1999 Fellow), Mehret Mandefro (2001 Fellow), and Mariano Castillo (2008 Fellow) have all been named Great Immigrants by Carnegie Corporation of New York as part of their July 4th tribute to immigrants. Fei-Fei Li is one of the leading experts in the artificial intelligence field, Mehret Mandefro is a film producer, anthropologist and doctor, and Mariano Castillo is a journalist and editor. In 2014, Pardis Sabeti (2001 Fellow) was honored as a Great Immigrant by Carnegie Corporation. 

Every Fourth of July since 2006, Carnegie Corporation has recognized the contributions of immigrants through its ā€œGreat Immigrants: The Pride of Americaā€ initiative. The tribute is simply a thank you that reflects Andrew Carnegie’s belief that naturalized American citizens contribute significantly to the health of American democracy. Fei-Fei, Mariano and Mehret are three of the 42 naturalized citizens who will be featured in a New York Times ad on July 4, 2016.

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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 ā€œvisual medicine.ā€ 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. 

Headshot of a man in his 30s who has heritage from Peru with light skin tone and crew cut black hair. He is wearing a black suit blue button up shirt and rectangle black rimmed glasses. He is looking at the camera.
Headshot of a woman in her 20s who has heritage from China with light skin tone and dark brown curled hair. She is wearing a purple and pink striped button up shirt. She is seated and leaning forward with her arms crossed, one hand gently rests under her chin, she is looking at the camera and smiling.

Fei-Fei LiĀ is a leading expert on artificial intelligence.Ā 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 atĀ the Computer Science DepartmentĀ atĀ Stanford University. As the creator of ImageNet, she has pioneered large-scale computer image recognition—a project she gave aĀ TED talkĀ 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, includingĀ Nature,Ā PNAS,Ā Journal of Neuroscience,Ā CVPR,Ā ICCV,Ā NIPSĀ 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 PhDĀ degree from California Institute of Technology, and a BS in physics fromĀ Princeton University. āˆŽ

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