Soros Fellowships Awarded to Eric Chung ’17 & Aisha Saad ’18

Eric Chung ’17 and Aisha Saad ’18 have been named Paul & Daisy Soros New American Fellows for 2016. They are among the 30 new Fellows who were selected from more than 1,400 applicants. The fellowships are awarded to immigrants or the children of immigrants to support their graduate study at any university in the United States.

Aisha Saad ’18 was born in Cairo, Egypt and immigrated to the United States with her family in the early 1990s. Saad’s early childhood in Egypt and regular summer visits growing up gave her dual exposure to industrial development and its disparate impacts on a global scale.

After graduating from the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill, Saad pursued master’s and doctorate degrees at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, focusing on public challenges to the modern corporation and the development of effective corporate responsibility regimes. Saad then spent two years as an assistant professor at the American University in Cairo, helping to launch a master’s degree in sustainable development and teaching courses on corporate social responsibility and social and environmental policy.

At Yale Law School, she is focusing on the legal theory of the corporation and representing marginalized communities through impact litigation in cases of environmental and corporate injustice.

Born to Chinese parents who emigrated from Vietnam to Canada and then to the United States after the Vietnam War, Eric Chung ’17 grew up in Madison Heights, a small city near Detroit, Michigan.

Chung received his AB, summa cum laude, from Harvard University, where he studied comparative social policy with a focus on education, health, and welfare systems. He served as a Pamela Harriman Foreign Service Fellow at the U.S. Mission to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and organized a field study on educational equality in Finland with the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. Chung became certified as an educator with the Harvard Graduate School of Education and taught civics for South Boston and Boston Chinatown immigrants. He has worked on social policy issues with a range of government institutions, including the Massachusetts Senate, U.S. Department of State, and the White House.

At Yale Law School, Chung is a student director of the Education Adequacy Project, a clinic representing disadvantaged youth in an educational rights case, and a member of the Supreme Court Advocacy Clinic. He researches at the intersection of law and policy, exploring how legal frameworks including constitutional rights and federalism can improve social policy.

The 2016 Soros Fellows, who are 30 or younger, come from a range of socio-economic backgrounds, and are all naturalized citizens, green card holders, DACA recipients, or the children of immigrants. Their backgrounds reflect the diversity of recent immigrants and refugees in the United States. Those who were born abroad hail from Bangladesh, Canada, China, the Dominican Republic, Egypt, Germany, India, Iran, Israel, Mexico, Myanmar, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and the United Kingdom.

The Fellowship Program for New Americans was established by Hungarian immigrants Paul and Daisy Soros in 1997 as a way to “give back” to the country that had afforded them and their children great opportunities. Each Fellow will receive tuition and stipend assistance of up to $90,000 in support of graduate education in the United States.