Two Yale faculty members — a trailblazing astrophysicist born in India and a renowned immunologist born in Japan — have been named to the 2025 class of “Great Immigrants, Great Americans” by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
Priyamvada Natarajan, whose research has deepened our understanding of black holes and dark matter, and Akiko Iwasaki, who has made landmark discoveries into how the immune system defends against viruses, are among 20 scientists, artists, business leaders, and entertainers to receive the award this year.
The “Great Immigrants, Great Americans” initiative honors naturalized citizens of the United States who have made important contributions to American society, democracy, and culture. The awards have honored more than 750 naturalized citizens since 2006.
Previous recipients of the honor include Nobel laureates Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, actors Pedro Pascal, Helen Mirren, and Steven Yeun, tennis greats Steffi Graf and Martina Navratilova, singers Abbas (Bas) Hamad and Alanis Morissette, and cellist Yo-Yo Ma.
The new honorees — a group that includes composer Tania León, U.S. Rep. Raúl Ruiz, and former prima ballerina Yuan Yuan Tan — will be recognized with a full-page public service announcement in the New York Times on the Fourth of July.
Natarajan is the Joseph S. and Sophia S. Fruton Professor and Chair of Astronomy and professor of physics in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS). She joined the Yale faculty in 2000.
She was born in Coimbatore, India, to academic parents who encouraged her scientific curiosity. She earned her Ph.D. from Cambridge in 1999, where she was the first woman in Astrophysics to be elected a Fellow at Trinity College, and her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from MIT.
Her research focuses on the formation, feeding, and feedback from black holes and their relationship to their host galaxies in the earliest stages of the universe, and her groundbreaking theories are now being validated by a new generation of powerful space telescopes.
Natarajan is also director of Yale’s Franke Program in Science and the Humanities and author of the book “Mapping the Heavens: The Radical Scientific Ideas That Reveal the Cosmos.”
Iwasaki is the Sterling Professor of Immunobiology and professor of dermatology at Yale School of Medicine, and of molecular, cellular, and developmental biology in FAS, professor of epidemiology at Yale School of Public Health, and investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
She was born and raised in the Kansai region of Japan, where her father was a physicist, and her mother worked at a media company. She left Japan as a teenager to finish high school in Canada and received her bachelor’s degree and Ph.D. from the University of Toronto. She joined the Yale faculty in 2000.
Iwasaki, who leads research on the mechanisms of immune defense against viruses that infect the host via mucous membranes and the pathophysiology of infectious diseases — and who was a leading researcher during the COVID-19 pandemic — has been lauded by scientists and policymakers alike. She is also a director of the Yale Center for Infection and Immunity, and has identified key immunopathological mechanisms underlying severe COVID and is investigating the root causes of long COVID.
Among their many honors, Iwasaki and Natarajan were named to Time magazine’s list of 100 most influential people in 2024.
