Three Cornellians named recipients of Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans
By Ben Badua, Creative Content Manager
Current doctoral candidate Max Gotts and alumni Carina Shiau ’21 and Syed Tahmid Mahbub ’17 were among the 30 recipients of the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship, which provides merit-based funding for immigrants and children of immigrants to pursue graduate education in the United States.
Awardees were selected from a pool of over 2,600 applicants and will receive up to $90,000 towards their graduate studies. Since 1998, more than 800 fellows from over 100 countries have received upwards of $80 million to pursue graduate degrees in a variety of fields, ranging from medicine to law, neuroscience, engineering and the arts.
Learn more about Cornell’s honorees below.
Max Gotts is currently pursuing a doctorate in the field of ecology and evolutionary biology at the Graduate School. Advised by associate professor Maren Vitousek and affiliated with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Gotts' research focuses on how climate change is causing rapid evolution in birds, such as the red-winged blackbird and violet fronted-brilliant.
Utilizing data and hierarchical Bayesian models to help examine complex biological systems, Gotts focuses on processes that occur on both ecological and evolutionary levels. He also teaches a course on speciation to local high school students through the Graduate Student School Outreach Program (GRASSHOPR) and the Einhorn Center for Community Engagement.
Immigrating to the United States from the United Kingdom with his family in 2010 in pursuit of economic opportunity, Gotts earned his bachelor’s degree in ecology and evolutionary biology with minors in astrobiology and mathematics from Princeton University. A former Udall Scholar (2023) and Gold Presidential Service Honoree (2020), he has performed fieldwork on three continents with a focus on conservation, evolution and behavior.
Carina Shiau earned her degree in computational biology from Cornell in 2021. A member of Phi Beta Kappa, she graduated summa cum laude and is now a medical student at Harvard University. A native of Taiwan, Shiau immigrated to the United States at the age of two when her family settled in a community just outside of Houston, Texas.
Combining rigorous scientific inquiry with patient-centered care, Shiau’s research focuses on improving therapies for pancreatic cancer by developing computational frameworks to identify cell-to-cell interactions that may obstruct the efficacy of cytotoxic treatments. Shiau’s work has been published in Nature Genetics and she has presented her findings at national conferences, including the American Association for Cancer Research.
Holding patents for her innovations in pancreatic cancer detection and treatment, Shiau has also been published in Nature Chemical Biology, Frontiers in Oncology, JAMA Dermatology, The American Journal of Medicine, and Cancer Discovery
Syed Tahmid Mahbub ’17 moved to the United States at 18 to attend Cornell thanks to a generous financial aid package. Majoring in electrical and computer engineering, Mahbub worked closely with professor Bruce Land, whose videos about microcontrollers he’d watched in high school.
During his time on the Hill, Muhbub was honored with the Tsuhan Chen Outstanding Undergraduate TA award and the William S Einwechter Award for his distinguished record of service. After graduating summa cum laude, Mahbub spent six years designing computing hardware at Apple before deciding to pursue a PhD in electrical and computer sciences at the University of California-Berkeley in 2023.
As a first-year graduate student, Mahbub worked remotely as a visiting lecturer at Cornell and helped to develop an open-source embedded systems course focused on a low cost of entry. His current research centers on the practical challenges in power electronics to help accelerate the adoption of renewable energy and electric transportation, and to reduce power consumption in data centers. His work has been recognized by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) conferences.