Five students at Yale Law School, including one who is also pursuing a philosophy Ph.D. in Yale’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS), an incoming Ph.D. student in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese, and a recent Yale College alumnus are among the 30 individuals to receive 2025 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans, a merit-based program that supports graduate study for immigrants or children of immigrants.
Current and incoming Yale students receiving fellowships are Summia Tora, Tal Feldman, Eshika Kaul, and Brian Reyes ’21, all students at Yale Law School; Ibrahim Dagher, a J.D. candidate at Yale Law who is also pursuing a Ph.D. at GSAS; and Briseyda Barrientos Ariza, an incoming student in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese.
Alex Rocha-Álvarez ’22, a Yale College alumnus now pursuing a Ph.D. in ethnic studies at the University of California, Berkeley, is also part of the new cohort of fellows.
The 30 fellowship recipients were selected from more than 2,600 applicants nationwide.
“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 fellowship. “We are proud to support these exceptional individuals as they pursue their academic and professional goals.”
In addition to receiving up to $90,000 to support their graduate studies, the new cohort of Soros fellows join an active network of past recipients, including nearly 120 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 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship recipients from Yale follow. More about all of the 2025 winners can be found on the fellowship website.
Briseyda Barrientos Ariza, who will pursue a Ph.D. in Spanish and Portuguese in Yale’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, was born in the Central American diasporic hub of Hyattsville, Maryland, where she grew up listening to her grandfather’s stories about his encounters with regional folkloric figures: shapeshifting horse-women, weeping murderous-mothers, and gnome-like men who braided hair.
Motivated by the lore that captivated her during girlhood, as an undergraduate at Towson University’s Honor’s College she revisited Guatemala and its storytellers to examine their oral stories. After receiving the Leadership for Public Good Fellowship, she recorded, transcribed, and translated 21 oral histories on Guatemalans’ folkloric encounters, which served as fieldwork in her undergraduate honors thesis. At TU, she founded the Honorables of Color organization and received a $1,000 scholarship to champion intentional spaces for students of color within Honors Colleges.
After graduating Ariza was awarded a Gates Cambridge Scholarship to pursue her M.Phil. in European, Latin American, and comparative literatures and cultures at the University of Cambridge. At Cambridge, she published her poetry in The Trinity Review, edited The Scholar magazine, presented at the Cambridge History of Memory & Emotions Conference, and was invited to attend the first Central American Futurities Conference which was held at Yale.
She will continue her scholarship on Central American orature and its revolutionary potential in Yale’s Department of Spanish & Portuguese as a Dean’s Emerging Scholar Fellow and Graduate Fellow at the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration (RITM). She aims to establish Centers of Orature Studies across (inter)national institutions to proliferate its study and vernacular, while connecting all her communities in the U.S., U.K., and Latin America.
Ibrahim Dagher, who is pursuing a J.D. and Ph.D. at Yale, was born in New York City, the child of two devout Muslims from Lebanon who were the first immigrants to the United States in each of their families. When he was five his family moved to California’s Central Valley, where they would find a permanent home in the city of Modesto.
He spent his childhood between California’s arid valleys and Lebanon’s humid coasts. His visits to Lebanon deepened his connection to Islam in local mosques. As a high school senior, Dagher moved to Beirut for a year to help family. In October of that year, protests and a revolution swept across Lebanon, with calls for governmental resignations and constitutional reforms. While the constitutional efforts failed, the experience inspired him to explore more deeply what ideas ground the American constitutional system.
Upon returning to the U.S., he studied philosophy and political science at the University of California, Davis. Enthralled by philosophy, and how its analytical method could be used to elucidate bedrock concepts, he took graduate seminars, spoke at conferences, and published several papers in moral philosophy and metaphysics, including in top journals like Philosophia and Synthese. His thesis, also in metaphysics, won several university prizes.
He is now pursuing a J.D./Ph.D. at Yale, where he is pursuing research at the intersection of law and philosophy, hoping to elucidate what balance of values undergirds the U.S. Constitution, how it ought to be interpreted by judges, and how philosophical method can move the law forward.
Tal Feldman, who is a J.D. candidate at Yale Law School, plans to work in the United States government, focusing on national security and innovation policy.
Before law school, he served as an artificial intelligence (AI) engineer across multiple federal agencies. Leveraging his computer science skills, he led a team in building AI tools for bureaucratic processes at the U.S. State Department. He later built AI models for the Federal Reserve, served as an AI advisor to the U.S. Embassy in London, and helped develop quantitative tools at the Department of Defense. Bringing both computational and regional expertise to his work in government, Feldman speaks four languages fluently — English, Russian, Hebrew, and Spanish — and codes in many more.
After graduating from high school at 16, Feldman attended Wake Forest University as a Stamps Scholar, a full-ride merit scholarship. He was named a Harry S. Truman Scholar for his public service work and spent his junior year at the London School of Economics, as well as a semester in Santiago, Chile. In addition to to earning an undergraduate degree in mathematics and economics, he also earned a master’s in global affairs as a Schwarzman Scholar, where he researched Chinese industrial and innovation policies.
Feldman’s commitment to government service is rooted in his family’s history. For generations, his family secretly listened to Voice of America behind the Iron Curtain, dreaming of freedom in the United States. After local communist officials seized their home, his maternal grandfather sued the Soviet government all the way to the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union. He lost, and the whole family faced retaliation.Feldman’s paternal grandfather was raised in Kazakhstan, where his family was exiled by Stalin’s regime. He later distributed anti-Soviet books, evading the police. As a teenager, his mother delivered a speech before the city council denouncing government injustice and sent a protest letter to the leader of the Soviet Union, risking her academic future. In 1990, Feldman’s family escaped communist rule and moved to Israel, where he was born. They later moved to the United Kingdom and then to Fort Worth, Texas, where he grew up and calls home.
Eshika Kaul, a J.D. candidate at Yale Law School, was born and raised in New Jersey. The daughter of Kashmiri immigrants from India, she connected with her heritage as a child through Indian classical dance, learning Bharatanatyam, Kuchipudi, and Mohiniyattam. She has performed across the United States. 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.
She is passionate about leveraging economic and tax policy to reduce inequality and uplift families. At Wellesley College, where she graduated with a double major in economics and peace and justice studies, she was a leader in civic engagement, expanding service opportunities for students by establishing partnerships with local nonprofits. Her commitment to creating a positive change earned her the Harry S. Truman Scholarship, one of the nation’s most prestigious public service-oriented awards.
Kaul’s interest in tax policy began when she worked alongside lawyers, accountants, and law students at the Harvard Legal Services Center Federal Tax Clinic to advocate for low-income taxpayers with IRS controversies. At the clinic, she personally leveraged her tax certification to secure tens of thousands of dollars in benefits for under-resourced clients, including formerly incarcerated individuals and intimate partner violence survivors. After witnessing single mothers lose the tax rights of their children to abusive former partners, she worked with the 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, Kaul worked nationally on economic and tax policy at the White House, the Congressional Budget Office, and the U.S. Department of Treasury. For her dedication to advocating for others, she recently received the Upstander Award from the global nonprofit Facing History and Ourselves.
Brian Reyes ’21, a Yale College alumnus who is now a J.D. candidate at Yale Law School, was born and raised in New York City between East Harlem and the Bronx. As a son of Dominican immigrants, he felt at home in these sections of New York, where introducing oneself to a new friend-to-be usually included an obligatory mention of where one’s family originally called home and a lively compare-and-contrast of cultures.
Attending high school in a wealthier part of the city added context to his view of his hometown —he gained access to invaluable educational resources, yet his commute from the Bronx entailed crossing racial and socioeconomic divides on a daily basis. His gratitude for the education he received, and his conviction that such opportunities ought to be available to everyone, laid the foundation for his interest in government.
Reyes ultimately attended Yale, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in history. He later earned master’s degrees in comparative social policy and U.S. history from the University of Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship. Driven by memories of home, much of his academic research attempted to understand the long aftermath of New York City’s 1975 fiscal crisis and its lessons for equitable urban policy. In his professional work, he has engaged local practitioners with technical assistance on how to deploy federal industrial policy funding, helped drive the development of anti-poverty and community development ideas in a governor’s office, and, most recently, helped defend financial regulations on Capitol Hill.
As a J.D. student, he is now exploring the laws potential to drive inclusive economic development. He hopes to ultimately work in federal economic policy, channeling financial resources with special care for the neighborhoods that need them most.
Alex Rocha-Álvarez ’22, a Yale College alumna who is pursuing a Ph.D. in ethnic studies at the University of California, Berkeley, was born to Mexican farmworkers who raised her between the strawberry fields of Watsonville, California. As a resident of Jardines del Valle, a farmworker community also known as Murphy’s Camp, she grew up witnessing firsthand the hardships and resilience experienced by agricultural workers.
As a first-generation college student at Yale, she graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa with a Bachelor of Arts in American studies and a focus on politics in American communities. While at Yale, Rocha-Álvarez explored themes of labor, migration, and resilience in her coursework and independent projects. A pivotal moment came when she returned home to Watsonville during the COVID-19 pandemic, and, while doing her university coursework remotely, saw how her community of farmworkers was overlooked in national discussions. This realization drove her to study the history of Murphy’s Camp —she discovered that her home was built as a labor camp for Filipino workers in the 1920s, making it a place of deep history that has always belonged to farmworkers
As a Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley, she will continue to give voice to her farmworker community. She plans to research the impact of agricultural labor and housing policies from the official dismantling of labor camps in the 1970s to the present with the hopes of uncovering hidden histories of adaptation and transformation and using her scholarship to inform equitable policies that address the needs of farmworker communities.
Summia Tora, a J.D. candidate at Yale Law School, is the founder of Dosti Network, an organization dedicated to empowering Afghans both within Afghanistan and those living as refugees with crucial resources and education. As an Afghan refugee who has personally experienced displacement, Tora understands the challenges faced by displaced individuals, which fuels her drive to actively engage in refugee resettlement and advocate for access to education for students affected by conflict and displacement.
In response to the fall of the Afghan government in 2021 Dosti Network launched a global effort to connect Afghans with essential resources for resettlement worldwide and to provide support to those remaining in Afghanistan. Tora has worked with organizations such as the World Bank, New America, Malala Fund, United Nations, and Schmidt Futures. Through this work, she has consistently championed the transformative power of education and advocated for refugees, women, and girls in crisis context. Prior to the fall of the Afghan republic, her academic work centered on understanding peace perspectives within Afghanistan and documenting the viewpoints of individuals from diverse socio-economic backgrounds.
Her achievements include being the first Rhodes Scholar from Afghanistan and obtaining master’s degrees in public policy and an M.Sc. international human rights law from the University of Oxford. She holds B.A. in economics and peace & global studies from Earlham College, where she was a Davis UWC Scholar. She is also a graduate of UWC USA.
Tora is an Echoing Green fellow, listed in the BBC’s 100 Women, Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, and a recipient of the Central European University Open Society Prize. Her work been featured in The New York Times, BBC, Forbes, The Economist, The Intercept, and NPR.
