Samuel Kim ’15 Awarded Graduate Fellowship for New Americans

Chemistry major Samuel Kim and two other Princeton alumni, Allan Jabri and Yessica Martinez, — all of the Class of 2015 — have been awarded the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans, a graduate school fellowship for outstanding immigrants and children of immigrants in the United States.

The Princeton fellows are among 30 who were selected from 1,766 applicants for their potential to make significant contributions to U.S. society, culture or academic work. They will receive up to $90,000 for graduate study in the United States.

“Whether it is through scientific discovery, business, literature, medicine or law, immigrants enrich our everyday lives in the United States in profound ways,” said Craig Harwood, who directs the fellowship program. “As a country, we need to refocus our attention on immigrant contributions.”

Samuel Kim was born in New Jersey to immigrant parents from South Korea and is now in an M.D./Ph.D. program at Stanford. At Princeton, Kim was a chemistry major and earned a certificate in global health and health policy. He worked in the lab of Tom Muir, the Van Zandt Williams Jr. Class of 1965 Professor of Chemistry, where he studied the epigenetic code by developing chemical tools with the CRISPR/Cas9 technology, research that became his senior thesis and later was published.

Kim wrote in his statement: “I hope to open up new and more patient-relevant questions for both scientific advancement and benefit of the everyday patient. … By bringing together all that science and medicine [have] to offer, through research and discovery, if I can one day help one more patient celebrate in victory, it will have been worth it.”

The fellowship program was established in 1997 by Hungarian immigrants Paul and Daisy M. Soros of New York as a charitable trust to support graduate study by new Americans — immigrants and children of immigrants. Selection criteria focus on accomplishments that show creativity, originality and initiative in light of the challenges and opportunities that have been part of the applicant’s immigration story. The program is open to college seniors, students in the early stages of their graduate career and those in the workforce who are seeking graduate training.

Read the full story here:
https://www.princeton.edu/news/2018/04/17/three-princeton-alumni-awarded-fellowships-new-americans