Five South Asian Americans Among 2021 Class of Paul & Daisy Soros Fellows

Five South Asian Americans are among the 2021 Class of Paul & Daisy Soros Fellows, made up 30 outstanding immigrants and children of immigrants. Selected from 2,445 applicants, these students, chosen for their potential to make significant contributions to the United States, will receive up to $90,000 in funding over two years. 

South Asian American fellows include Sita Chandrasekaran, Pooja Chandrashekar, Archana Podury, Ashwin Sah and Syed Mahmud Raza Rizvi. 

Paul and Daisy Soros, Hungarian immigrants and American philanthropists, established their Fellowship program for New Americans—immigrants and children of immigrants—in December of 1997.  They created the program as a way to give back to the country that had afforded their family such great opportunities.

Sita Chandrasekaran, who is pursuing a PhD in Bioengineering at University of California, Berkeley, is raised in the Bay Area. As a child, her parents encouraged her connection to her roots, and she grew up learning classical South Indian music and dance, performing at local community centers. Her affinity for science was inspired by her father’s work as an aerospace engineer. She studied biochemistry at San Francisco State University. After spending a summer working part-time refining microscopes for observing plankton behavior in drops of water, Chandrasekaran was inspired to join the UCSF-UCB joint bioengineering PhD program. She then joined the lab of Patrick Hsu at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, upon which the lab switched focus to developing a fast and scalable diagnostic. After finishing her training, she aims to have a research career in developing therapeutics.

Pooja Chandrashekar is currently a MD/MBA student at Harvard Medical School and Harvard Business School. Her work focuses on improving healthcare delivery for underserved populations. As an undergraduate at Harvard College, the Fairfax, Virginia-born-and-raised Chandrashekar received an AB in biomedical engineering. She pursued projects at the intersection of engineering and medicine, including developing a medical device to provide behavioral therapy for autistic adolescents and an online platform to detect environmental health hazards. After graduating, she pursued a Fulbright Scholarship in Goa, India, where she researched the impact of stigma on autistic children in rural communities, after which she pursued health policy research at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, National Health Service England, and Crimson Care Collaborative. She has published more than a dozen papers in peer-reviewed journals and co-authored an upcoming book chapter on reforming the U.S. healthcare system for older adults. She also serves as the managing assistant editor for “Healthcare: The Journal of Delivery Science and Innovation,” a peer-reviewed medical journal. Most recently, she started the COVID-19 Health Literacy Project to create and translate COVID-19 information into 40+ languages for non-English speaking patients sidelined during the pandemic. For her contributions and passion for advancing healthcare, she was named to the 2021 Forbes 30 Under 30 Healthcare list. She is the founder and CEO of ProjectCSGIRLS, an international nonprofit dedicated to encouraging middle school girls in STEM, for which she received the Harvard Medical School Dean’s Community Service Award.

Archana Podury is currently enrolled in the MD in Medicine program at Harvard University. She was born in Mountain View, California, to parents who emigrated from India. Shortly after, her family returned to India for five years so Podury could share the daily lives of her grandparents and deeply explore her heritage. As an undergraduate at Cornell University, she worked with Professor Jesse Goldberg to study neural circuits underlying motor learning. Her growing interest in whole-brain dynamics led her to the Princeton Neuroscience Institute and Neuralink, where she discovered how brain-machine interfaces could be used to understand diffuse networks in the brain. She was awarded various fellowships in support of her work, including the Hunter R. Rawlings Presidential Research Scholarship and the Zuckerman Prize for Bioengineering Research. While studying neural circuits, Podury worked at a syringe exchange in Ithaca, New York, where she witnessed firsthand the mechanics of court-based drug rehabilitation. Now in the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology program, Podury is interested in combining computational and social approaches to neuropsychiatric disease.

Syed Mahmud Raza Rizvi was born in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, to Pakistani immigrants, who were escaping sectarian persecution and seeking greater educational opportunities for their children. As a toddler, Rizvi was diagnosed with Stargardts, which would render him blind. At 19, he was contacted by the National Federation of the Blind (NFB), a revolutionary group of blind people, transforming the blind narrative. After graduating from their intensive training program in Louisiana, he enrolled at the University of Texas at Austin. In college, Rizvi was elected as vice president of the National Association of Blind Students (NABS). He co-founded the NABS Diversity and Inclusion Committee, and as the appointed Central Texas field director for the NFB, he traveled to Capitol Hill, promoting domestic policies and international treaties to empower the disabled in academia. In May 2020, Rizvi graduated with his BA in government, receiving the university’s highest honor, named as the Dean’s Distinguished Graduate. During the COVID19 outbreak, Rizvi volunteered with Imamia Medics International, delivering crucial information and supplies to underserved communities. Most recently, he cofounded the American Muslim Bar Association, an organization dedicated to disseminating legal education to disenfranchised communities, providing legal protection to marginalized groups and mentoring the next generation of minority attorneys.

Ashwin Sah is pursuing his  PhD in mathematics at MIT. The Portland, Oregon-born raised Sah developed a passion for mathematics research as an undergraduate at MIT. He has given talks on his work at multiple professional venues. He has received the Barry Goldwater Scholarship as well as the Frank and Brennie Morgan Prize for Outstanding Research in Mathematics by an Undergraduate Student. Additionally, his work on diagonal Ramsey numbers was recently featured in Quanta Magazine. Beyond research, Sah has taken opportunities to give back to the math community that has supported him, helping to organize or grade competitions such as the Harvard-MIT Mathematics Tournament and the USA Mathematical Olympiad. He has also been a grader at the Mathematical Olympiad Program, a camp for talented high-school students in the US, and an instructor for the Monsoon Math Camp, a virtual program aimed at teaching higher mathematics to high school students in India.