Three medical students awarded 2015 Soros Fellowships

Three Stanford medical students are among the 30 recipients of the 2015 Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans, which support graduate studies for immigrants to the United States and their children.

Each of the Soros Fellows, selected from a pool of 1,200 applicants, can receive as much as $90,000 for tuition and living expenses in support of graduate education.

Cecil Benitez, PhD, a medical student, was born in Mexico and moved to the United States with her family when she was 9 years old. She earned a PhD in developmental biology at Stanford studying the transcriptional networks of the development of insulin-producing cells in the pancreas. Her work led to numerous publications, including a chapter in a biology textbook.

Paras Minhas is a student in the MD/PhD program and is working toward a PhD in neuroscience. He is the son of Sikh immigrants and grew up in Maryland. He attended the University of Pittsburgh, where he conducted research on Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases, which led to several scientific publications. He recently co-managed Stanford’s Pacific Free Clinic in east San Jose. He currently works in the laboratory of Katrin Andreasson, MD, studying the inflammation and bioenergetics of neurodegenerative disorders.

Gerald Chunt-Sein Tiu is a student in the MD/PhD program and is working toward a PhD in genetics. He is the son of Burmese-Chinese parents who emigrated to California from Myanmar. He graduated summa cum laude in chemical and physical biology from Harvard University. Then, he was awarded a Michael C. Rockefeller Fellowship to study the social, political and cultural dynamics of HIV in China and Myanmar. He works in the laboratory of Maria Barna, PhD, on RNA-mediated gene regulation in mammalian development.