Three current Yale students and a member of the Yale College Class of 2023 are among the 30 individuals to receive 2026 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans, a merit-based program that supports graduate study for immigrants or children of immigrants.
The new fellows are Jorge Andres "Andy" Flores, a J.D. candidate at Yale Law School; Gloria Oladipo, who is pursuing a Master of Fine Arts degree at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale; Akhil Rajan '21, '21 M.A., who is now a J.D./Ph.D. candidate at Yale Law School; and Bayan Galal '23, who studied molecular biology and global affairs as a Yale undergraduate and is now a medical student at the University of Pennsylvania.
The 30 new fellows were selected from more than 3,070 applicants nationwide - the most competitive field in the fellowship's 28-year history.
"The 2026 class brings together some of the most exceptional young people in the country, and what unites them is not just their talent but the resilience and perspective that comes from the immigrant experience," said Craig Harwood, director of The Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans. "That combination is something this country needs now more than ever,"
In addition to receiving up to $90,000 to support their graduate studies, the new Soros fellows join an active network of past recipients, including more than 125 from Yale since the fellowship was established in 1998.
Past fellows include former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy '03 M.D., '03 M.B.A.; the novelist Sanjena Sathian '13; AI leader Fei-Fei Li; composer Lera Auerbach; Olympic gymnast Amy Chow; venture capitalist Raj Shah; and computational geneticist Pardis Sabeti.
Biographies of the new Soros fellows from Yale follow. View the full list of 2026 fellows.
Akhil Rajan '21, '21 M.A., who was born in Chicago to parents of Indian heritage, earned both a bachelor's degree and master's degree in political science at Yale, where he graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. He also holds a master's degree in comparative social policy from Oxford, where he studied as a Marshall Scholar.
At Yale, he was awarded the John Addison Porter Prize and the Frank Minor Patterson Prize for his senior essay examining the consequences of redistricting on substantive and descriptive representation. He was also co-president of the Undergraduate Legal Aid Association, on the executive committee of the Center for Social Justice and Public Service and worked as a fellow for former Secretary of State John Kerry.
Rajan's career has focused on policy initiatives that diminish spatial inequality and advance economic mobility for all Americans. He served as director of implementation policy for the White House chief of staff office during the Biden administration, helping to enact its Investing in America agenda and responding to crises like the collapse of the Baltimore Bridge and outbreak of H5N1 Avian Flu. Before that, he worked as a policy advisor on the White House Infrastructure Implementation Team, at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and on campaigns at the state, local, and national levels.
Bayan Galal was born in Prospect, Connecticut, one of five children of Egyptian immigrants, where she says she absorbed communal values centered on mutual responsibility. Those lessons, she says, also shaped her understanding of care as a shared commitment sustained across generations and borders.
Growing up between the United States and Egypt, she observed how structural gaps in health systems follow families across different contexts. She witnessed relatives in Egypt navigate chronic illness within fragmented and resource-limited settings, and in high school served as an emergency medical technician. These experiences sparked her interest in medicine and grounded her commitment to strengthening health systems for Middle Eastern and African diasporas, both in the U.S. and internationally.
As a Yale undergraduate, Galal studied molecular biology and global affairs. She was also elected student body president, becoming the first Arab and first Muslim student body president in Yale's history. In that role, she focused on reducing structural barriers to student well-being, advancing reforms to financial aid and academic policies. During this time, she also conducted public health research with national ministries of health, consulted for the World Health Organization, and interned with global NGOs such as Save the Children and the International Rescue Committee. Her work has been published in The Lancet and JAMA Open Network, among other journals.
After completing a graduate program in population health sciences at the University of Cambridge as a Marshall Scholar, she began medical school at the University of Pennsylvania. At UPenn, she led the United Community Clinic, a student-run free clinic serving immigrant communities in Philadelphia, and founded Providing Access to Health, a health navigation program. She also works on several research projects in the Middle East and Africa focused on strengthening health data infrastructure and serves as national chair-elect of the student branch of the Association of American Medical Colleges.
Through clinical care, research, and system design, she seeks to advance and strengthen health systems both domestically and abroad.
Gloria Oladipo is a playwright, critic, and journalist from Chicago whose work investigates "the complications of thick, sticky, overwhelming love." Born to two Nigerian immigrants, both educators who encouraged her interest in the arts, she spent much of her childhood surrounded by language and literature.
Introduced to professional theater through the Steppenwolf Young Adult Council and through bootleg online Broadway performances, she fell in love with theater's possibility. As an undergraduate at Cornell, she created the Veterans' Playwriting Program, a playwriting initiative for women of color veterans, in collaboration with Steppenwolf Theatre. After graduation she spent four years as a reporter with the Guardian US. covering a variety of breaking news topics. Her work has also been published in The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Guardian, American Theatre Magazine, and other publications.
Oladipo is the 2023 recipient of the American Theatre Critics Association's Edward Medina Prize for Excellence in Cultural Criticism; a former Public Theater's Emerging Writers Group Fellow; a 2025 Velvetpark Writers Fellow, and the 2024 recipient of the Dramatists Guild Foundation Thom Thomas award. Her work has been in residence or developed by New York Stage and Film in Poughkeepsie, New York; the Lucille Lortel Theatre in New York; Boston Court Pasadena in Pasadena, California; Workshop Theater in New York; and the Fresh Ground Pepper Group, among other institutions.
At the Geffen School she is pursuing a Master of Fine Arts degree in playwriting. Her ultimate goal, she says, is to become a "genre-less artist," someone working in multiple mediums (theater, film, television) while maintaining creative control over her projects and path.
Jorge Andres "Andy" Flores was born in Biloxi, Mississippi, to a Panamanian mother and a Mexican father. In the aftermath of their separation, he spent his early years in Panama City, Panama, where he still recalls waking to the smell of his grandmother Wita's ojalda, a traditional fried bread, in the mornings, and helping his grandfather, Wito, a carpenter, as he shaped wood into armoires and rocking chairs. This vivid childhood, full of love and acceptance, grounded Flores' values in compassion and community.
At five, he returned to Mississippi, where he was raised his mother, who worked three jobs to pay the bills. He eventually enrolled at the University of Mississippi on a full Pell grant, studying public policy leadership and the philosophy of education. He soon began advocating for education access. On campus he served as president of the First-Generation Student Network and as the student body's director of inclusion. In 2021, he founded the grassroots campaign to help preserve the HELP Grant, the state's only need-based aid package for students at or below the poverty line. He graduated as class marshal (first in his class) and became the first Latino from Mississippi to receive the Harry S. Truman Scholarship.
After college, he worked at the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. Later, his passion for public policy and higher education brought him to Nashville, where he helped launch the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator. He went on to launch the Aspen Institute's inaugural Youth Advisory Council and cofounded the Public Interest Law Association, a nonprofit cultivating the next generation of public interest lawyers.
At Yale Law School, Flores is now pursuing coursework in constitutional law and education policy. He hopes to become a civil rights attorney and law professor, returning to the Deep South to expand opportunities for vulnerable learners and communities. Ultimately, his goal is to help transform education and to lead a renewed, national culture of public service in America.
