Incoming Harvard Medical School student Shubhayu Bhattacharyay has been named a 2024 recipient of a Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans.
The fellowship recognizes immigrants and children of immigrants pursuing graduate degrees. Bhattacharyay was one of 30 fellows chosen this year from a pool of 2,323 applicants.
Born in Kolkata, India, Bhattacharyay spent his early childhood in Thailand and Vietnam before his family settled in Los Angeles. He attended Johns Hopkins University, double- majoring in biomedical engineering and applied mathematics and statistics with a minor in Spanish.
Bhattacharyay was drawn to a career in medicine after his first year of college when he met survivors of traumatic brain injury, or TBI, who were participating in a brain-computer interface study. He was motivated to find ways to apply his interest in computational neuroscience to improve TBI survivors’ quality of life.
In 2020, Bhattacharyay began pursuing a PhD in clinical neuroscience at the University of Cambridge with the support of a Gates Cambridge Scholarship. For his thesis, he developed AI methods to improve the detail of information provided for prognostic counseling and suggest individually optimized treatment plans for patients being treated for TBI in intensive care units.
Bhattacharyay plans to become a physician-engineer in neurocritical or neurosurgical care. His current research focuses on identifying sources of bias in medical AI to protect TBI patients’ safety and equity. Ultimately, he hopes to use big data — analysis of massive information sets — to enhance TBI care. He will begin his MD program at HMS later this year.
About the Soros Fellowship
Recipients of the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship are chosen for their potential to make meaningful contributions to U.S. society, culture, or their academic fields. Fellows receive $90,000 in funding over two years.
Founded by Hungarian immigrants Daisy M. Soros and her late husband, Paul Soros, the fellowship program honors the contributions of continuing generations of immigrants in the United States.
Adapted from a Paul and Daisy Soros news release.
