The Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans


The Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans, founded by Paul Soros and Daisy Soros, is a merit-based United States postgraduate fellowship for immigrants and children of immigrants. In 2017, the Fellowship received 1,766 applications and awarded thirty Fellowships for a selection rate of less than 2%. Each Fellow receives up to $90,000 in funding toward their graduate education, which can be in any field and at any university at the US. The Fellowship, which honors the contributions of immigrants to the US, was founded in 1997. In 2010, the couple had contributed a total of $75 million to the organization's charitable trust.
Past fellows include the former United States Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, both the youngest Surgeon General to occupy the position, as well as the first of Indian descent. Other alumni include Iranian-American Ebola researcher Pardis Sabeti and Fei-Fei Li, a Stanford professor and the Director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab and the Vision Lab.
The Fellowship has no restrictions based on field of study, and has supported graduate students in public policy, business, law, music, arts, humanities and the social sciences.

About the Fellowship

The Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans supports up to two years of graduate study in any field at any advanced degree-granting program in the United States. Each Fellow receives up to $25,000 a year in stipend support and up to $20,000 per year tuition support, allowing Fellows to receive as much as $90,000 over two years. Fellows attend two Fall Conferences in New York City designed to introduce the Fellows to one other and to examine their New American experience.

Mission

The Fellowship provides opportunities for continuing generations of able and accomplished New Americans to achieve leadership in their chosen fields and to partake of the American dream. The program was established in recognition of the contributions New Americans have made to American life and in gratitude for the opportunities the United States afforded by Hungarian immigrants to the United States, Paul and Daisy Soros.

Selection criteria

The Fellowship looks for applicants who have:
New American Status: If an applicant was born abroad as a non-US citizen, then they must have been naturalized, be a green card holder, be adopted, or be a DACA recipient. If an applicant was born in the US, or was born abroad as a US citizen, both parents must have been born abroad as non-US citizens.
Academic Standing: To be eligible, applicants must be entering graduate school or in the first two years of graduate school as of the application deadline. Fellows must be enrolled in full-time graduate studies during the Fellowship.
Age: Applicants can not have reached or passed their 31st birthday as of the application deadline. The Fellowship makes no exceptions.

Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship recipients

Nearly 625 students have been recipients of The Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans, as of 2018, including