Three medical students awarded 2014 Soros Fellowships

Three Stanford medical students are among the 30 recipients of the 2014 Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans, which support graduate study for immigrants to the United States and their children.

Each of the Soros Fellows, who were selected from more than 1,200 applicants, will receive as much as $90,000 for tuition and living expenses in support of graduate education.

Roxana Daneshjou is a student in the MD/PhD program. Her parents immigrated to the United States from Tehran in the late 1970s, when the Iranian Revolution was gaining momentum.

In 2011-12, she was awarded an a fellowship from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute for her work on anticoagulant sensitivity in African-Americans, and she is the lead researcher on the Iranian Genome Project, the first project to study Iranian ancestry through whole-genome sequencing. Daneshjou plans to use the fellowship award to support her work toward an MD degree and a doctorate in genetics.

Dan Feng

Dan Feng, a medical student, was born in southern China and moved to the United States in 2007 after she was offered a full scholarship for biomedical graduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania. As a graduate student, she made a discovery that sheds light on why people doing shift work have a higher risk of metabolic disorders. The finding was published in Science in March 2011. Feng will use the fellowship award to support her work toward an MD degree.

Jonathan Tsai is a student in the MD/PhD program. He is the son of Chinese immigrants and grew up in Silicon Valley, moving to Brussels with his family as a teenager. After graduating with honors from the California Institute of Technology, Tsai was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to study human and cancer growth factors at Israel's Weizmann Institute of Science, resulting in publications in leading scientific journals. He is working under pathology professor Irving Weissman, MD, to develop new tools to study blood and solid organ development and regeneration. Tsai will use the fellowship award to work toward an MD degree and a doctorate in developmental biology.

Jonathan Tsai