Congratulations to former Biology undergraduate students Arya Rao and Julian Robles, who have been named 2026 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellows. The Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans supports the work of outstanding graduate students who are immigrants or children of immigrants.
Arya Rao is the child of immigrants from India, and the fellowship will support her work towards an MD in Medicine and a PhD in Bioinformatics and Integrative Genomics at Harvard University. Julian Robles is a child of immigrants from Mexico, and the fellowship will support his work towards a PhD in English at University of California, Berkely. Each will receive up to $90,000 in funding over two years.
Daisy Soros and her late husband Paul Soros were both Hungarian immigrants and philanthropists, and according to the fellowship website, this year’s class of Fellows “is made up of 30 outstanding immigrants and children of immigrants from all over the country and world who are pursuing graduate school here in the United States.” Fellows were selected from more than 3,000 applicants and chosen “for their potential to make significant contributions to the United States.”
