Roxana Moussavian (COL '11) and Ivan Kuznetsov (MED/SEAS) win Soros Fellowships

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University of Pennsylvania alumna Roxana Moussavian, class of 2011, and Ivan A. Kuznetsov, an MD/PhD student at the Perelman School of Medicine and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, have been awarded the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans. The Soros Fellowship is a graduate school fellowship for outstanding immigrants and children of immigrants in the United States.  Selected from 1,775 applicants, each of the recipients was chosen for their potential to make significant contributions to US society, culture, or their academic field and will receive up to $90,000 in funding for the graduate program of their choice.

Roxana Moussavian (COL 2011) from Palo Alto, CA, is an entrepreneur, policy adviser, and storyteller. Born in Upstate New York and raised in California, Roxana is the daughter of Iranian immigrants, and they and her two sisters are her role models. Inspired by her family, she is passionate about increasing access to economic opportunity and social empowerment, both domestically and abroad. Roxana is currently studying at Yale Law School. After completing her JD degree, she will continue to focus on effecting changes that help more people realize their full potential.

 Roxana has worked in both the government and nonprofit sectors. While studying the modern Middle East and math at the University of Pennsylvania, she cofounded a nonprofit that helps high-potential students from around the world obtain a quality education by connecting them directly with donors through an online crowdfunding platform. After graduating magna cum laude from Penn, Roxana joined the Obama administration, where she worked for four years. Most recently, she served on the National Economic Council, where much of her work entailed collaborating with business, labor, and nonprofit partners to help more Americans—especially those who traditionally face barriers to acquiring a job that pays a decent wage—receive education and training for good-paying jobs. Roxana also co-organized the Obama administration’s first White House Iranian New Year’s celebration in 2012, which became an annual tradition.

In 2015 Roxana left the White House to pursue her own storytelling project. With support from New America, Amtrak, and the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office, she traveled across the United States to interview people who successfully overcame significant socioeconomic challenges, thanks in part to some of the policies she had previously worked on. Working together with a team of filmmakers and interactive designers, they turned these interviews into short documentaries demonstrating how business, labor, nonprofits, and government can create new pathways for workers to advance in their careers.

Ivan A. Kuznetsov (MD/PhD) from Raleigh, NC, is currently enrolled in the MD/PhD program at the University of Pennsylvania, where his work is supported by the NIH through the Medical Scientist Training Program. His research focuses on the computationally driven design of new proteins with functions not found in nature, which could potentially be applied to a variety of medical tasks.

The son of Russian immigrants, Ivan Kuznetsov was born in Columbus, Ohio, where his father held a one-year postdoctoral research position. Due to visa restrictions, the family had to leave the United States when Ivan was only two months old. He spent his early years living in Russia and Austria. He was four when the family returned to the US after his parents were offered academic jobs in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Ivan was exposed to science from a young age and jumped at any opportunity to pursue advanced coursework and research. He took graduate math classes and worked in a university lab while still in high school. Ivan received his bachelor’s degrees in biomedical engineering and applied math and statistics from Johns Hopkins University, where he was awarded the Charles R. Westgate Scholarship in Engineering for his high school research achievements.

At Hopkins, Ivan conducted neuroscience research, exploring new ways of delivering drugs into the brain, creating algorithms for the diagnosis of psychiatric disorders from brain images, and exploring new computational models of how neuronal synapses in the brain are maintained. As an undergraduate, he published eighteen papers, most as the first author, in peer-reviewed journals. For his research, he was awarded the Barry Goldwater Scholarship. He was also named an Amgen Scholar and selected as a participant in the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology Summer Institute.

The new Fellows join the prestigious community of recipients from past years, which includes individuals such as US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, Chief Scientist of Artificial Intelligence at GoogleCloud Fei-Fei Li, pharmaceutical CEO Vivek Ramaswamy, Lieutenant Governor of Washington Cyrus Habib, leading American Civil Liberties Union attorney Nusrat Choudhury, award-winning writer Kao Kalia Yang, and nearly 600 other New American leaders.

            More info about the scholarship at https://www.curf.upenn.edu/content/soros

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