The cafeteria on the second floor of MIT’s Building 24 was nearly empty on a Tuesday afternoon when I first heard about the new Soros class. A graduate student mentioned it almost in passing, the way people in Cambridge mention things that elsewhere would be front-page news.
Six MIT names this year. The most competitive applicant pool the fellowship has ever seen. Three thousand applications. Thirty winners.
| Category | Details |
|---|---|
| Program Name | Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans |
| Founded | 1997 |
| Award Amount | Up to $90,000 over two years |
| Eligibility | Immigrants and children of immigrants pursuing graduate study in the US |
| 2026 Applicant Pool | Over 3,000 — the most competitive in 28 years |
| MIT 2026 Fellows | Denisse Córdova Carrizales, Ria Das, Ronak Desai, Stacy Godfreey-Igwe, Arya Rao, Ananthan Sadagopan |
| Incoming PhD Fellow | Avinash Vadali (condensed-matter physics) |
| Fellowship Contact at MIT | Kim Benard, Associate Dean of Distinguished Fellowships |
| Fields Represented | Nuclear science, EECS, computational chemistry, bioengineering, more |
| Notable Past Recognition | LeRoy Apker Award, Marshall Scholarship, Hertz Fellowship |
There’s a sense, walking through the long corridor that connects the physics labs, that something quietly unusual is happening here. The Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowships have always favored a particular kind of student — children of immigrants, first-generation strivers, people whose family stories include borders and language gaps and the slow work of belonging. But the 2026 class feels different. Maybe it’s the sheer competitiveness. Maybe it’s the fields. Maybe it’s the timing, with so much uncertainty around American tech leadership and what the next decade looks like.
Take Denisse Córdova Carrizales. She grew up in Houston, the daughter of Mexican immigrants, and somehow ended up running experiments on quantum materials in Mingda Li’s lab. Her published work appears in Nature Physics and Nature Materials. She has lobbied Congress on nuclear disarmament. And — this is the kind of detail that sticks — she once played the lead in an off-Broadway show. It’s hard not to notice how the fellowship rewards this kind of multidimensional life rather than the polished, single-track résumé that Silicon Valley recruiters tend to favor.
Then there’s Ria Das, who graduated from MIT in 2021 with a double degree in math and EECS, and is now back as a PhD student. She had been at Stanford, but stepped away from her doctorate there to think more deeply about questions of belonging and identity. That kind of pause — voluntarily exiting the academic treadmill — used to be career suicide. It still might be, in some quarters. But the Soros committee evidently saw something worth funding.
The other 2026 names — Ronak Desai, Stacy Godfreey-Igwe, Arya Rao, and Ananthan Sadagopan — round out a cohort working across bioengineering, gene editing, computational chemistry. One fellow, mentioned in the Soros materials, is developing CRISPR-based therapies already in clinical trials at UCSF. Another built whole-genome blood tests aimed at accessible cancer screening. The breadth is striking, and the practical orientation is striking too. These are not students chasing publications for the sake of publications.
Last year’s class included Rupert Li, a Portland-born math prodigy now at Cambridge on a Marshall Scholarship before heading to Stanford for his PhD. He spent two summers at the Duluth REU program, the kind of place where serious undergraduate mathematicians sharpen themselves against problems no one has solved. Watching the through-line from PRIMES-USA, the MIT-run high school program where Li first did research, to the fellowships he now holds, you start to see the infrastructure underneath all this. American science isn’t powered by genius alone. It’s powered by these chains of mentorship, scholarship, and small institutional bets.
It’s still unclear whether the United States can keep attracting and holding onto talent like this. The political mood shifts. Visa rules change. Funding tightens. But the 2026 Soros class, sitting in their labs and seminar rooms across Cambridge, suggests that for now the system is still producing what it was designed to produce. Whether the country knows what to do with them is a different question.
