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Two Harvard Medical School students and one incoming HMS student have received 2025 Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans. They are among 30 graduate students to receive the merit-based award for immigrants and children of immigrants.
Chosen from a pool of more than 2,600 applicants, they were selected for their achievements and their potential to make meaningful contributions to the United States. Each of the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellows will receive up to $90,000 in funding to support their graduate studies.
The 2025 HMS Soros Fellows are:
Carina Shiau, an MD student in the Pathways program at HMS. Driven by a belief in the unity of science and humanism, Shiau aspires to be a clinician-scientist, integrating computational research with compassionate patient care to foster connection and advance medical innovation.
Shiau was born in Taiwan and immigrated to the United States at the age of two. Her family settled in a small community on the outskirts of Houston, Texas. Shiau’s aunt, a mathematician and artist, used whimsical sketches and logic puzzles to teach Shiau math, which sparked a lifelong passion for exploring the connections between creative expression and analytical problem-solving. She studied computational biology at Cornell University and developed tools to model complex biological systems that underlie disease.
At HMS, Shiau combines rigorous scientific inquiry with patient-centered care. Her research focuses on improving therapies for pancreatic cancer by developing computational frameworks to identify cell-cell interactions that may obstruct the efficacy of cytotoxic treatments. She has published in multiple journals, including Nature Genetics, and her innovations in pancreatic cancer detection and treatment have been patented.
Jupneet Singh, an accepted MD student enrolling this summer in the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology (HST). A second lieutenant in the U.S. Air Force, she is the first female Soros Fellow to serve in the U.S. armed forces and was the first woman Air Force ROTC Rhodes Scholar. She plans to serve as a surgeon in the Air Force and enter the United States Public Health Commissioned Corps.
Singh’s parents moved to the United States from India shortly after they were married to find a better life for themselves and their children. Singh was born in Pennsylvania and grew up in Somis, California, deeply connected to her Punjabi and Sikh heritage.
Singh graduated from MIT in 2023 with a degree in chemistry and a concentration in history. There she was the commander of the Air Force ROTC Detachment, which has been recognized as the best detachment in the nation. As a Rhodes Scholar, she completed a master’s in public policy and a master’s in translational health sciences at Oxford University.
Singh conducted research on fatty liver disease under Alex Shalek at MIT and on maternal health inequalities at the National Perinatal Epidemiological Unit at Oxford. She received four fellowships for the program she founded, Pathways to Promise, to support the health of children affected by domestic violence. She has also worked in de-addiction centers in Punjab, India, and at the Ventura County Family Justice Center and Ventura County Medical Center Trauma Center, and she published a paper in The American Surgeon. After earning her MD, she plans to complete residency training as an active-duty Air Force captain.
Sreekar Mantena is an MD-PhD student in the HST program. Inspired as an undergraduate by the potential of statistics and data science to address gaps in health care delivery, he hopes to blend compassion with computation as a physician-scientist, using machine learning and statistics to advance equitable care.
The son of Indian American immigrants, Mantena was raised in North Carolina and spent summers with his grandparents in Southern India. His family taught him the importance of community and education.
Mantena graduated from Harvard College with a degree in statistics and molecular biology. As an undergraduate, he founded the Global Alliance for Medical Innovation, a nonprofit organization that has partnered with physicians in six countries to develop data-driven medical technologies for underserved communities.
