3 UW-affiliated graduate students among this year’s 30 Soros Fellows

“Two current UW graduate students and one recent alumnus have been selected to receive the prestigious Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for Young Americans. Pictured here, from left to right: Daniel G. Chen, Briana Martin-Villa and Ethan Shen. Credit: Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans. Photo: Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans Two current University of Washington graduate students and one recent alumnus received this year’s prestigious Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans . This merit-based program supports outstanding immigrants and children of immigrants pursuing graduate education in the United States. Thirty fellows were selected this year from a competitive pool of more than 3,000 applicants nationwide. Their remarkable contributions and potential span a range of fields, including medicine, law, engineering, literature, computer science, public service and the arts. “Having three members of the UW community receive Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans is a remarkable honor,” said UW President Robert J. Jones. “This fellowship recognizes immigrants and the children of immigrants whose work strengthens communities and advances knowledge, which aligns closely with the University’s mission and values. The accomplishments of these scholars speak to the UW’s commitment to expanding opportunity, advancing research and discovery, and serving the public good. We’re very proud to see their achievements acknowledged.” Fellows will receive up to $90,000 for their graduate studies, as well as lifelong access to the fellowship’s distinguished alumni network. This year’s fellows are Daniel G. Chen , Class of ’22, who received both a Marshall Scholarship and a Goldwater Scholarship, and is now pursuing a doctoral degree at the University of California, Los Angeles; Briana Martin-Villa , a doctoral student in the UW School of Medicine; and Ethan Shen , a doctoral student in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. Chen is the son of Chinese immigrants who came to the UW at 14 via the Robinson Center for Young Scholars. While at the UW, Chen interned with Meta’s Facebook AI Research team and he interviewed people from Greece with UW’s International Studies Department. He also conducted research at the Institute of Systems Biology and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center to identify drivers of the human immune response to COVID-19 and solid tumors in skin, lung and pancreatic tissue. Chen’s UW education was supported by the Washington Research Foundation and the Goldwater Scholarship. The Marshall Scholarship enabled Chen to continue his research at the University of Cambridge where he studied the athymic organoid system. That work led him to pursue a doctoral degree at UCLA where he aims to develop new lines of therapy that increase immunotherapy efficacy while minimizing off-target side effects. “I am deeply grateful to the Soros Foundation for this honor. The financial support afforded to me by the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship provides me the time and space to investigate new therapeutic strategies to overcome existing and future barriers to cancer immunotherapy,” Chen said. Martin-Villa , now a first-year student at the UW School of Medicine, experienced rural health disparities firsthand earlier in her life when she, her twin brother and their mother worked long days in orchards in Eastern Washington. She witnessed the effects of heat, physical strain, pesticides and untreated illnesses on farm workers and was compelled to make medical advances more accessible after training in Stanford University research labs as an undergraduate. Martin-Villa co-developed programs to improve communications between Latine childhood cancer survivors and clinicians. After graduation, she was named a John Gardner Public Service Fellow at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. During the fellowship, she worked on the Biden Cancer Moonshot and initiatives to increase community engagement in science. She was drawn to the UW School of Medicine because of its WWAMI model of community-based training in rural and urban areas across a five-state region. She now co-leads Doctor for a Day, an academy that introduces youth to health careers. She also co-manages the Casa Latina Clinic, which cares for King County’s medically underserved communities. She hopes to practice as a physician at the intersection of patient care, research and public policy. “As the daughter of Mexican immigrants, it is a profound honor to represent my community and to receive support that allows me to continue doing the work I love while creating opportunities to uplift others,” Martin-Villa said. “I’m excited to learn from and grow alongside the other fellows as I continue my medical training.” Shen is a doctoral student in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering advised by Professor Ali Farhadi. Shen was born in Seattle to parents who emigrated from China after the Cultural Revolution and the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown. In the U.S., they had the freedom to pursue their education and better their lives. Shen was inspired by his parents’ story and his experience growing up in a city with a booming technology industry that improved people’s quality of life. Shen decided to study computer science at the UW with a focus on artificial intelligence. He completed his bachelor’s within three years and continued into the Allen School’s doctoral program, where his research advances affordable, open-source coding agents such as SERA — short for Soft-Verified Efficient Repository Agents — that enable rapid creation of specialized agents for private codebases. With the support of the Soros Fellowship, Shen will continue working on agents for long horizon tasks and scientific discovery, as well as novel model architectures, with the goal of making frontier intelligence accessible and useful to as many people as possible. “Artificial intelligence is increasingly privatized, and the best AI models are prohibitively expensive. My research focuses on developing new data pipelines and model architectures for cheap, personalized models that are both capable and broadly accessible,” Shen said. “AI has become an essential tool across engineering, computing and the natural sciences, and I believe that everyone should be able to afford and use it.”

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