Two Students Receive 2019 Soros Fellowships for New Americans

Two students have received the 2019 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans, a graduate school fellowship for outstanding immigrants and children of immigrants in the United States.

The thirty recipients this year were selected from 1,767 applicants. Each of the recipients was chosen for their potential to make significant contributions to U.S. society, culture, or their academic field and will receive up to $90,000 in funding for the graduate program of their choice. They join a community of 625 recipients from past years.

The students include Maria Camila Bustos ’21 and Alexander Zhang J.D./Ph.D.

“It’s thrilling to see what these brilliant young minds from around the country and world are working on—genetics, fiction, computer science, law, medicine, music — these young New Americans will amaze you,” said Craig Harwood, who directs the Fellowship program. “Paul & Daisy Soros Fellows are all passionate about giving back to the country and remind us of the very best version of America.” 

The 2019 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellows are all the children of immigrants, green card holders, naturalized citizens, or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival (DACA) recipients. 

Founded by Hungarian immigrants, Daisy M. Soros and her late husband Paul Soros (1926–2013), the program honors continuing generations of immigrant contributions to the United States.

Yale Law School 2019 Soros Fellow Bios:

Award to support a J.D. at Yale Law School

Maria Camila Bustos was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia before moving to Miami, Florida when she was thirteen. Seeing her parents leave everything they knew behind for her and her sister convinced Camila of the importance of perseverance, imagination, and hard work. During high school, she learned about climate change and its devastating impacts on vulnerable communities inside and outside the United States. She felt shocked at the failure of the international community to seriously tackle the crisis.

At Brown University, Camila studied environmental studies and international relations, focusing on the United Nations climate negotiations, fossil fuel divestment, and state-level climate change legislation. In college, she was keen to critique and address the lack of diversity in environmental spaces, pushing for the inclusion of environmental justice in the curriculum and the rejection of the disparate impact of environmental burdens on low-income and communities of color.

When visiting Colombia to study the human rights impacts of coal extraction and the country’s foreign position on climate change, Camila realized she wanted to return after graduation, especially as the country reckoned with the end of an over fifty-year old conflict.

As a researcher at the Center for the Study of Law, Justice, and Society (Dejusticia) in Colombia, Camila explored climate-induced displacement and the threat that populist governments pose to human rights advocates around the world. She was also a plaintiff and part of a team who won a groundbreaking lawsuit against the Colombian government for failing to meet its deforestation targets.

At Yale Law School, Camila works on immigrant rights and climate justice issues inside and outside the classroom. She hopes to continue working on climate change litigation and policy in the future, focusing on the intersection of corporate accountability and human rights.

Award to support a J.D./Ph.D. in history at Yale

Alexander Zhang grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas without a word for history. His parents, both from China, raised him with the languages that had brought them to America: microbiology from his father and music from his mother. 

After Alexander graduated from high school, he realized there were languages yet to be built. Languages that could help people live, understand, and love in new ways. He spent his college years trying to form a more perfect lexicon of race and rights—one that highlighted the role of culture in shaping law and accounted for people traditionally underrepresented in historical and legal scholarship.

In 2018, Alexander received a four-year bachelor’s and master’s in American studies magna cum laude from Yale University and was one of two students in his class to earn Exceptional Distinction. As a poet, he performed for Bill Clinton, opened for Hillary Clinton, and had a poem briefed to the White House. While at Yale, he helped organize and effort to rename Yale’s Calhoun College (now Grace Hopper College) after Roosevelt Thompson YC’84. His thesis on the history of race won the John Addison Porter prize for outstanding scholarship in any field. And his photography appeared in The New York Times, ELLE, and others. While working on Madison Avenue, he helped create brands for companies like Google and Hyatt. While working in Silicon Valley, he led consumer marketing for Instagram’s growth division and was asked by the CEO to teach the company about the history of snapshots.

Alexander plans to continue his legal history work while completing a law degree and Ph.D. in history at Yale University. His scholarship will bridge constitutional law with ethnic studies, examine the relationships between legal concepts understood by courts and legal concepts understood by everyday people, and synthesize African American, Native American, Latinx, Asian American, and Pacific Islander histories.