Seven Indian Americans among 2025 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellows

Arjun Ramani, Devika Ranjan, Eshika Kaul, Jupneet Singh, Sreekar Mantena, Swathi R. Srinivasan, and Vaithish Velazhahan among winners of prestigious honor

By Arun Kumar 

Seven Indian Americans are among the winners of 2025 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans, a prestigious honor awarded annually to outstanding immigrants or children of immigrants pursuing graduate education in the United States.

This year’s seven Indian American recipients are: Arjun Ramani, Devika Ranjan, Eshika Kaul, Jupneet Singh, Sreekar Mantena, Swathi R. Srinivasan, and Vaithish. Fellows were selected for their potential to make significant contributions to the United States. They will each receive up to $90,000 in financial support for their graduate studies.

READ: Five Indian Americans among City & State’s 2025 Queens Power 100 (March 27th, 2025)

New Fellows were selected from a pool of more than 2,600 applicants nationwide and represent the remarkable contributions and potential of New Americans across a range of fields, from medicine and law to engineering, literature, computer science, public service, and the arts, according to the Foundation.

“This year’s class of Paul & Daisy Soros Fellows represents the extraordinary promise of New Americans and the vital role they play in driving innovation, discovery, and progress,” said Craig Harwood, Director of The Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans. “We are proud to support these exceptional individuals as they pursue their academic and professional goals.”

Now in its 27th year, the Fellowship founded in 1998 has supported more than 800 individuals whose work is shaping and enriching American society, according to an announcement from the foundation.

Here are the bios of Indian American fellows.

Arjun Ramani:

Arjun Ramani was born in West Lafayette, Indiana to immigrants from Tamil Nadu, India. Growing up, Arjun’s father, an engineering professor, instilled in him a love of technology and imagining possible new futures. His mother, executive director of a children’s science museum, took him on trips across the world and encouraged him to journal about his observations.

These dual interests in technology and the world led Arjun to Stanford University, where he studied economics as an undergraduate and pursued a master’s in computer science specializing in artificial intelligence. His undergraduate thesis on the impact of remote work on cities won the Kennedy Prize for best undergraduate thesis in the social sciences.

After graduation, Arjun became The Economist’s global business and economics correspondent. In 2023 Arjun moved to India to cover the Indian economy in the lead up to its election, history’s largest democratic event. Arjun wrote or co-wrote six cover stories, was shortlisted for UK financial journalist of the year in 2024 for his AI and economics reporting, and co-authored a six-part special report on India’s economy.

Arjun is now pursuing a PhD in economics at MIT where he studies technological change and innovation. He hopes his research can inform policies and business practices that generate broadly-shared economic growth.

Devika Ranjan:

Born in Nashik, India and raised in various parts of the United States—from mountain towns to prairie landscapes and coastal communities— Devika Ranjan discovered her roots through her family’s journey across the country. Devika is now a writer, educator, and theater-maker who tells critical and creative stories about migration.

Devika infuses joy and justice in community-based work, using performance to cultivate communities of care. She specializes in devised immersive performance and has facilitated workshops with refugees and migrants internationally.

Devika works at the intersection of migration, performance studies, and cross-cultural practice. As associate director of Albany Park Theater Project in Chicago, Devika worked with immigrant and first-generation teens to create ethnographic immersive theater about community issues like family separation, labor rights, and deportation.

Devika studied culture and politics, with a minor in Arabic, at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. As a Marshall Scholar alumna, Devika holds a distinction from the University of Cambridge for her MPhil in sociology, where she did research on the electronic tagging of asylum-seekers.

Devika was an inaugural fellow at the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics from 2017-2019. Previously, she has been a global cultural fellow at the Institute for International Cultural Relations, University of Edinburgh, and a Projects for Peace Fellow with the Davis Foundation.

Eshika Kaul:

Born and raised in New Jersey, Eshika Kaul is the daughter of Kashmiri immigrants from India. Growing up, Eshika connected with her heritage through Indian classical dance, learning Bharatanatyam, Kuchipudi, and Mohiniyattam. She has performed across the United States, including at charity events, Madison Square Garden, and the Prudential Center.

Deeply influenced by her family’s enduring hope of returning to Kashmir despite the ongoing violence, she is dedicated to approaching politics with optimism and a relentless pursuit of progress.

Eshika is passionate about leveraging economic and tax policy to reduce inequality and uplift families. She graduated summa cum laude from Wellesley College with a double major in economics and peace and justice studies.

After witnessing single mothers lose the tax rights of their children to abusive former partners, Eshika worked with the Harvard Legal Services Center Federal Tax Clinic to create the Single Mothers Project, which was aimed at reclaiming these rights without having to retraumatize survivors through repeated interactions with abusers.

These service experiences fueled her academic interests, culminating in her economics thesis, “More Money, More Meals? The Effect of the Child Tax Credit on Child Food Insecurity,” for which she received the Natalie Bolton Thesis Prize for Economic Policy.

After graduating, Eshika worked nationally on economic and tax policy at the White House, the Congressional Budget Office, and the United States Department of Treasury. For her lifelong dedication to advocating for others, Eshika recently received the Upstander Award from the global non-profit Facing History and Ourselves.

Jupneet Singh:

Jupneet Singh is a Sikh-American who grew up in Somis, California. She was born in Danville, Pennsylvania, to two Indian parents, her mother who grew up in Haryana, India, and her father who grew up in Punjab, India.

Her parents moved to the United States right after they were married to find a better life for themselves and their children. She grew up deeply connected to her Punjabi and Sikh heritage, traveling to India, particularly Amritsar, every year.

In 2023, Jupneet graduated from MIT with a degree in chemistry and a concentration in history. While at MIT, she was the Commander (highest-ranked cadet) of the Air Force ROTC Detachment, which has been recognized as the best detachment in the nation.

She is the first woman Air Force ROTC Rhodes Scholar. She completed two degrees at Oxford, a master’s of public policy and a master’s in translational health sciences. She is pursuing an MD at Harvard Medical School’s Health Sciences Technology (HST) program.

Jupneet has worked in de-addiction centers in Punjab, India. She received four fellowships for $8400 for the program she founded, Pathways to Promise, to support the health of children affected by domestic violence.

After serving as a surgeon in the Air Force, she hopes to enter the United States Public Health Commissioned Corps.

Sreekar Mantena:

Sreekar Mantena is the son of Indian-American immigrants. He was raised in North Carolina, and grew up just as fond of cheese grits as his mom’s chana masala. Every summer of his childhood, he lived with his grandparents in Southern India, who instilled in him the importance of investing in one’s community and a love of learning.

As an undergraduate at Harvard College, Sreekar was inspired by the potential of statistics and data science to address gaps in healthcare delivery. He founded the Global Alliance for Medical Innovation, a nonprofit organization that has partnered with physicians in six countries to develop data-driven medical technologies for underserved communities, including devices to detect corneal disease.

He also pursued research in Professor Pardis Sabeti’s lab, where he built new algorithms to design diagnostic assays that improve the detection of infectious pathogens in resource-limited settings.

He has co-authored over 20 scientific publications, and his lead-author work has been published in many journals, including Nature Biotechnology, The Lancet Digital Health, and The Journal of Pediatrics.

Sreekar graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard College with a degree in statistics and molecular biology. He is currently pursuing training through the joint Harvard Medical School-MIT MD/PhD program, where he is a PhD student in biomedical informatics.

Swathi R. Srinivasan:

Swathi Srinivasan was born in Cleveland, Ohio to two Indian immigrant parents whose love for science led them to pursue graduate education in the United States. Swathi was raised with an engineer’s fascination for understanding the world and an organic chemist’s passion for problem-solving.

As a high school student, Swathi’s curiosity led to her award-winning research on micronutrients in Indian spices and Alzheimer’s disease prevention, a testament to the inexplicable role of heritage and home in Swathi’s endeavors.

At Harvard, Swathi thought often of Ohio, especially amidst a worsening overdose crisis in her hometown. Pivoting from neuroscience to social studies and history of science, she focused on understanding the origins and impacts of inequity and injustice on health outcomes, particularly among people who use drugs and people living with, or at risk for, HIV/AIDS.

Swathi conducted research on the overdose crisis response in Ohio and Portugal. She also explored health equity efforts through internships at various levels of government, including at the UN and the White House.

Upon graduating, Swathi was selected as a Rhodes Scholar, where she completed an MPhil in history of science, medicine, and technology, researching US involvement in South Africa’s HIV/AIDS response. Currently, Swathi is an AmeriCorps Fellow in overdose prevention at Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program.

Vaithish Velazhahan:

Born in Manhattan, Kansas, to parents from Tamil Nadu, India, Vaithish Velazhahan spent his childhood in India where he nurtured a curiosity for science and medicine and played basketball and chess for his school team.

A United States citizen by birth, Vaithish had to relocate to the US on his own to pursue his dream of studying medicine. Unable to transfer any credits from his prior advanced coursework in India, Vaithish had to repeat several classes at Kansas State University (KSU).

At KSU, Vaithish found his passion for research. He conceived and took on an independent project to study how dietary flavonoids could help prevent cancer, which led to a first-authored manuscript and was recognized with Barry Goldwater Scholarship and multiple NSF and NIH-funded grants.

Vaithish pursued his PhD at the University of Cambridge as a Gates Cambridge Scholar where he developed new techniques to determine the first high-resolution structures of G protein-coupled receptors from fungi, culminating in two first-authored manuscripts published in the journal Nature and the Max Perutz Student Prize for outstanding PhD thesis.

Vaithish, currently pursuing MD training at Stanford, is also passionate about global health access and has worked with MEDLIFE in Peru and Ecuador and founded the nonprofit We Save in India, which develops technology to connect doctors with underserved patients.