Six Indian-Americans, are among the 30 graduate students who are the recipients of the 2017 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for the New Americans. Each of the recipients was chosen for their potential to make significant contributions to the U.S. society, culture or their academic fields and will be receiving up to $90,000 in funding over two years.
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The six Indian-American Fellows are Ellora Thadaney Israni, Pratyusha Kalluri, Sanjay Kishore, Shivani Radhakrishnan, Sanjena Sathian and Ashvin A. Swaminathan.
The Fellowship supports one to two years of graduate study in any field and in any advanced degree-granting program in the United States. Each award is up to $25,000 as stipend support, as well as 50 percent of required tuition and fees, up to $20,000 per year, for one to two years.
Israni is the child of immigrants from India and will use her Fellowship to support work towards a JD at Harvard University. Though she was born and raised in the Bay Area, Israni often returned to Pune, India, where her grandparents lived. Her parents, both Indian immigrants, were themselves the children of immigrants – Hindu refugees to India. They instilled in Israni a commitment to help to build a world that offers more equal opportunities. After graduation, Israni moved to New York City as a software engineer for Facebook. Now a JD candidate at Harvard, Israni hopes to leverage the intersection of technology and law to change the way we define and deliver justice in the United States.
Kalluri, a PhD student at Stanford University’s Department of Computer Science, was born on the East Coast and raised in Madison, Wisconsin. Her parents left India in the 1980s, seeking better job opportunities in America. As an undergraduate at MIT and, subsequently, a visiting researcher at the Complutense University of Madrid, Kalluri built AI systems modeling facets of human intelligence and human language processing. She aims to build artificial intelligence that is more human-like and understandable by synthesizing symbolic and statistical approaches.
Kishore will use his Fellowship to support work towards an MD at Harvard Medical School. Born and raised in rural Virginia, Kishore is the youngest child of parents who emigrated from Hyderabad, India. In high school Kishore pursued his interest in government and service, becoming the youth governor of the Virginia YMCA Model General Assembly. He went on to Duke University, where he designed his own major around the social determinants of health. Kishore sharpened his policy skills as the Villers Fellow at Families USA, a progressive health advocacy organization, and started Commonwealth Covered, Virginia’s first student-run campaign to enroll individuals in health insurance coverage. At Harvard Medical School, Kishore worked with fellow members of the Racial Justice Coalition to advocate for affordable health benefits for a union of over 700 Harvard dining workers. Kishore aspires to use his clinical training to serve as an advocate for individual patients and also as the foundation for a career organizing for a more just society. His elder brother, Sandeep Kishore, is a Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow in the Class of 2008.
Radhakrishnan, a PhD Philosophy student at Columbia University was born in Middletown, New York, to Indian parents from Bangalore and Baroda who met while working together in the Catskills. Growing up around Gujarati and Tamil, and studying Russian and Latin, Radhakrishnan, after finishing her AB at Princeton University and her BPhil at the University of Oxford, Radhakrishnan lived and taught in Vladivostok, Russia, as a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant. Radhakrishnan is now a PhD candidate at Columbia University, where she is studying philosophy’s role in social transformation. She has published critical essays and reviews in the Washington Post, n+1, the Paris Review Daily, and Boston Review. As an aspiring writer, critic at large and philosopher, Radhakrishnan wants to prompt reflective inquiry about the various aspects of our social and political lives that go unexamined.
Sathian’s Fellowship will support work towards an MFA in Creative Writing at University of Iowa. The daughter of Indian immigrants who was raised in Bible Belt Georgia. Sathian grew up reading Hindu mythological comic books, the New Testament and Flannery O’Connor. The granddaughter and great-granddaughter of respected South Indian translators, she always hoped to become a writer. Sathian earned a BA in English from Yale University, where she served as editor-in-chief of the Globalist magazine. Sanjena has worked as a health reporter for the Boston Globe before joining the media start-up OZY. Santhian is thrilled to begin study at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
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Swaminathan, will use his Fellowship to support a PhD in Mathematics at Princeton University. He was born in New Providence, New Jersey. His parents, both of whom earned graduate degrees in the United States after spending the first twenty years of their lives in economic hardship. He was the valedictorian of his high school class and received early election to Phi Beta Kappa as an undergraduate. Swaminathan, has demonstrated a strong commitment to excel in a broad range of academic subjects, mathematics is the love of his life and he aspires to become a math professor. After graduating from Harvard with degrees in both mathematics and physics, Swaminathan plans to pursue a PhD in mathematics at Princeton University.
By Premji
