The Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans has announced its 2024 class of distinguished Fellows, and among them are three outstanding Filipino-Americans: Ananya Agustin Malhotra, Hannah Keziah Agustin, and Celine Calpo. Selected from a pool of more than 2,300 applicants, these individuals represent the best and brightest of immigrant talent in the United States.
In addition to the 2024 Filipino-Americans, the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans has supported seven other scholars with Filipino heritage in its 26-year history. These Fellows include Mike Alvarez (2014 Fellow), Janine Joseph (2009 Fellow), Jonah Lalas (2010 Fellow), Jassmin Poyaoan (2014 Fellow), Steven Tagle (2013 Fellow), Flip Tanedo (2010 Fellow), and Enrique Toloza (2021 Fellow).
Ananya Agustin Malhotra, originally from Georgia, is pursuing a JD at Yale University. Raised in a bi-cultural and interfaith household, Ananya draws inspiration from her family’s immigrant backgrounds to advocate for a more just and peaceful future in United States foreign policy. Ananya’s academic journey has taken her from Princeton University, where she graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, to the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, where she earned an MPhil in modern European history. Ananya has been a vocal advocate for nuclear disarmament and risk reduction, working with organizations such as the Nuclear Threat Initiative and the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
Hannah Keziah Agustin, born and raised in Manila, Philippines, is pursuing an MFA in literary reportage at New York University. Since moving to the United States in 2019, Hannah has used her voice as a journalist, essayist, and poet to tell stories that liberate and empower immigrants like herself. Her essays and poems have been published in renowned literary magazines such as North American Review and Electric Literature. Hannah’s work has earned her accolades including the 2023 Clayton Prize for Emerging Poets from Michigan Quarterly Review and the 2022 W.W. Norton Writers Prize for Nonfiction.
Celine Calpo, a native of Imperial Beach, California, is also pursuing a JD. Celine’s parents, both immigrants from the Philippines, instilled in her a strong sense of cultural appreciation and intellectual curiosity. Despite facing challenges such as managing her diabetes and caring for her mother through illness, Celine graduated as salutatorian of her high school class and went on to attend Georgetown University on a full scholarship. As a program specialist for the International Office of the Federal Judicial Center, Celine has facilitated exchanges between federal judges and their foreign counterparts, with the goal of improving judicial administration and education in the United States.
These three Filipino American Paul & Daisy Soros Fellows join a diverse cohort of 30 individuals from various backgrounds and fields of study. They will each receive up to $90,000 in funding to support their graduate studies at institutions across the country. The Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans aims to celebrate and support the contributions of immigrants to the United States, and Ananya, Hannah, and Celine exemplify the program’s mission of excellence and innovation.
“As we welcome these impressive new Fellows to our community, I am filled with pride and hope for the bright futures they will have professionally and as they give back to our country. Their stories demonstrate the strength and vitality inherent in the immigrant identity—they aren’t afraid to take risks and think big,” Mrs. Daisy Soros, co-founder of the program, said. “Congratulations to the new Fellows.”
“Celebrating the exceptional cohort of 2024 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellows for New Americans, we highlight the remarkable achievements and boundless potential of these outstanding individuals.” Each Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow embodies the spirit of resilience, innovation, and commitment to excellence that defines the immigrant experience. Together, they represent a diverse tapestry of backgrounds, perspectives, and aspirations, poised to make enduring contributions to their fields and communities. We are honored to support and empower these inspiring leaders as they continue their transformative journeys, enriching the fabric of American society and beyond,” said Fellowship Director Craig Harwood.
Applications for the 2025-26 academic year are now open until October 31, 2024. Eligible applicants include green card holders, naturalized citizens, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival (DACA) recipients, individuals born abroad who graduated from both high school and college in the US, and the US-born children of two immigrants. For more information about the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships, visit pdsoros.org.
The full biographies of the 2024 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellows with Filipino heritage can be found here:
Ananya Agustin Malhotra
Fellowship awarded to support a JD at Yale
Born and raised in Georgia, Ananya Agustin Malhotra is the daughter of immigrants from Obando, Bulacan, Philippines and New Delhi, India. Raised in a bi-cultural and interfaith household, Ananya is deeply motivated by her mother and father’s family histories to advocate for a more just and peaceful future United States foreign policy.
Ananya’s interests lie at the intersection of global history, international law, and peace and security issues. She graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Princeton University with a concentration in the School of Public and International Affairs. Her undergraduate thesis, based on oral histories with New Mexican Downwinders, explored the human legacies of the 1945 Trinity Test and the US nuclear age. At Princeton, Ananya served as president of the Sexual Harassment/Assault Advising, Resources, and Education (SHARE) Peer Program, where she was first introduced to survivor-centered advocacy.
As a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford, Ananya earned an MPhil in modern European history with distinction, studying the histories of empire and anticolonialism in shaping international order. Her dissertation research explored the role of epistemology in the global intellectual history of decolonization and has been published in Global Histories and the Journal of the History of Ideas blog. For the last four years, Ananya has advocated for nuclear disarmament and risk reduction through her research, scholarship, and public commentary. Ananya has worked in Washington, DC at the Nuclear Threat Initiative and at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft to advance policies aimed at fostering a safer and more peaceful world.
Ananya has also worked or held internships at the Logische Phantasie Lab, UN Women, and the European Roma Rights Centre, and is a member of the Younger Generation Leaders Network on Euro-Atlantic Security (YGLN) and the British American Security Information Council’s Emerging Voices Network. She has authored and co-authored several policy briefs and has collaborated on projects with Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security. Some of her other writing and work can be found in Inkstick Media, Antonym Magazine, the American Oxonian, and the Oxford Review of Books.
Hannah Keziah Agustin
Fellowship awarded to pursue an MFA in literary reportage at New York University
Born and raised in Manila in the Philippines, Hannah Keziah Agustin is the daughter of Ilocano parents who went from the barrio to the city to pursue opportunity—which was also what made her family immigrate to Wisconsin in 2019. These journeys have deeply shaped the stories that Hannah writes about as a journalist, essayist, and poet.
When Hannah moved to the United States, she was 18 and wanted to tell stories that liberated the people around her, especially migrants like her who grappled with the challenges of their new world. This pushed her to double major in English and film studies, researching narratives of colonialism, exile, and the diaspora. As an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin–Whitewater, she was an active member of the University Honors Program, the Southeast Asian Organization, and The Muse, her university’s literary journal, where she was the nonfiction editor. Hannah wrote essays and poems that were later published in renowned literary magazines like North American Review, Electric Literature, and Michigan Quarterly Review.
Writing about her experience as an immigrant, she was the recipient of the 2023 Clayton Prize for Emerging Poets from Michigan Quarterly Review, the 2022 W.W. Norton Writers Prize for Nonfiction, and the 2021 Bernice Slote Award for Emerging Nonfiction Writers from Prairie Schooner. Hannah has also received support from the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, Key West Literary Seminar, Indiana University Writers Conference, Palm Beach Poetry Festival, and Image Journal.
After graduating from college, Hannah started working as a social media coordinator and writer for InterVarsity USA, a nationwide campus ministry headquartered in Madison, Wisconsin, where she creates content to grow students and faculty into world changers. She is a freelance journalist who covers events in Southeast Asia for Christianity Today, with a recent article being about the effects of church scandals on the faith of Gen Z Filipinos. As a member of the Sojourners Journalism Cohort, Hannah will be writing opinion pieces about migration and labor from a Christian social justice lens. In all that she writes, she fights for the liberation of all people, especially the people of her homeland, the Philippines.
Celine Calpo
Fellowship awarded to support work towards a JD
Celine Calpo hails from “the most southwesterly city” in the United States—Imperial Beach, California. Her father, Vito, is a former Overseas Filipino Worker who now works as a hotel houseman on the US Naval Base in Coronado (North Island); her late mother, Whelma, was a former fire department dispatcher within US Naval Base Subic Bay and a janitor at Jack-in-the-Box.
Her parents inspired cultural appreciation, intellectual curiosity, creativity, and moxie in many ways: encouraging lessons in Filipino martial arts (escrima) taught by her uncle, Grandmaster Bert Labitan, watching Jeopardy! as a family, and introducing her to photography through an old 35mm film camera. In turn, she assisted her parents in completing government forms, taught them computer skills, and apprised them of developments in American culture and politics.
Celine graduated as salutatorian of Mar Vista High School’s class of 2015 on top of managing her diabetes, caring for her mother through life-threatening illnesses, and navigating college admissions as a first-generation, low-income student. She attended Georgetown University on a full scholarship, was inducted into the Georgetown Scholars Program, and graduated with a BA in American Studies. In college, she interned at the Supreme Court of the United States and the US Senate –experiences that inspired her senior thesis on judicial ethics. After graduating, she set her sights on law school and was supported by the UCLA Law Fellows Program for aspiring first-generation lawyers.
As the program specialist for the International Office of the Federal Judicial Center—the research and education agency for federal courts—Celine manages and writes pieces for a website on comparative judicial practice, Judiciaries Worldwide, and facilitates exchanges between federal judges and their foreign counterparts. She has also taught US and foreign judges computer skills in rule-of-law programs at home and abroad. She hopes to employ the comparative perspective she has gained from her work to improve judicial administration and education in the United States.
EMBARGOED RELEASE: 5 am ET – April 17, 2024
PRESS CONTACT: Nikka Landau, [email protected]
Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowships Award 2024 Class of Distinguished New Americans Merit-Based Funding for Graduate School
Since 1998, 805 Fellows from 103 countries have been supported in their pursuit of higher education in the United States. Applications for the 2025-26 academic year are now open until October 31, 2024.
NEW YORK — Today, the board of directors of The Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans, a merit-based graduate school program for immigrants and children of immigrants, announced the program’s 2024 Fellows. Selected from 2,323 applicants, the 30 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellows are chosen for their achievements and their potential to make meaningful contributions to the United States across fields of study. They each will receive up to $90,000 in funding to support their graduate studies at institutions across the country. Read more about each 2024 Fellow and their heritage at www.pdsoros.org.
Since the Fellowship’s founding 26 years ago, the program has provided more than $80 million in funding, and recipients have studied a range of fields from medicine and the arts to law and business.
“As we welcome these impressive new Fellows to our community, I am filled with pride and hope for the bright futures they will have professionally and as they give back to our country. Their stories demonstrate the strength and vitality inherent in the immigrant identity—they aren’t afraid to take risks and think big,” Mrs. Daisy Soros, co-founder of the program, said. “Congratulations to the new Fellows.”
“Celebrating the exceptional cohort of 2024 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellows for New Americans, we highlight the remarkable achievements and boundless potential of these outstanding individuals.” Each Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow embodies the spirit of resilience, innovation, and commitment to excellence that defines the immigrant experience. Together, they represent a diverse tapestry of backgrounds, perspectives, and aspirations, poised to make enduring contributions to their fields and communities. We are honored to support and empower these inspiring leaders as they continue their transformative journeys, enriching the fabric of American society and beyond,” said Fellowship Director Craig Harwood.
The new class of Paul & Daisy Soros Fellows have Canadian, Cambodian, Chinese, Colombian, Haitian, Hungarian, Indian, Iraqi, Japanese, Mexican, Burmese, Palestinian, Peruvian, Filipino, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Sierra Leonean, South Korean, Vietnamese, and Zimbabwean. They are studying a wide range of fields, including applied physics, architecture, biomedical science and engineering, biological engineering, business, biophysics, chemical engineering, chemistry, computational and system biology, creative writing, economics, education, English and African American studies, film, political science, health services research, law, literary reportage, machine learning and learning theory, medicine, physics, theater, and quantum computing.
The 2024 Fellows will be attending Brown University, California Institute of Technology, Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, New York University, Northwestern University, Stanford University, UC Berkeley, UC San Diego, the University of Chicago, the University of Michigan – Ann Arbor, the University of Pennsylvania, and Yale University.
The 2024 Paul & Daisy Soros includes several firsts for the community:
- The first Fellows to have heritage from Portugal, Sierra Leone, and Zimbabwe.
- The first Fellows from undergraduate institutions including the University of Central Florida, University of Montana, University of Wisconsin – Whitewater, Texas State University, and Virginia Commonwealth University.
- The first class of Fellows to include three Filipino Fellows, bringing the total number of Filipino Fellows to ten.
In addition to receiving up to $90,000 in funding for the graduate program of their choice, the 2024 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellows join a distinguished community of past recipients. The alumni network includes US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, who is the first surgeon general of Indian descent and helped lead the national response to Ebola, Zika, and the coronavirus; lawyer Julissa Reynoso, who serves as the US ambassador to Spain and Andorra; Damian Williams, who is the first Black US attorney for the southern district of New York and serves as chair of the attorney general’s advisory committee; and composer Paola Prestini, who was named by NPR as one of the “Top 100 Composers in the World” and plays on major stages across the world.
2025 Application Now Open
The application for the 2025-26 academic year is open and due by October 31, 2024. Selection criteria focuses on accomplishments that show creativity, originality, and initiative and is open to college seniors, students applying to graduate school, and those who are in the early stages of graduate school. All applicants must be planning to be enrolled full-time in an accredited graduate program in the US in the 2025-26 academic year. In addition, applicants must be 30 or younger as of the application deadline.
Eligible New Americans include green card holders, naturalized citizens, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival (DACA) recipients, individuals born abroad who graduated from both high school and college in the US, and the US-born children of two immigrants. Full eligibility requirements can be found here.
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Founded by Hungarian immigrants Daisy M. Soros and her late husband Paul Soros (1926-2013), The Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans program honors the contributions of continuing generations of immigrants in the United States.
For more information about the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships, visit pdsoros.org. Find us on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn at: @PDSoros, and sign up for our newsletter.
Nikka Landau
Director of Communications
