Halawi & Khan Receive Soros Award

Mohammad Halawi, Noorain Khan, receive Soros Fellowship

Graduate students Mohammad Halawi and Noorain Khan have received the prestigious Paul & Daisy Soros fellowships. The award recognizes students who are immigrants or children of immigrants.

They will receive up to $16,000 a year for theior tuition, and $20,000 maintenance grants. Each award lasts two years.

Noorain Khan is completing her MPhil in Migration Studies at the University of Oxford, where she is a Rhodes Scholar. She previously obtained a BA from Rice University and studied abroad at the American University in Cairo. She plans to pursue a JD and work in migration policy. Now 23, she was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to US naturalized citizen parents from Pakistan. Noorain has devoted considerable energy to promoting participation of Muslims in US society and interfaith understanding; her current research focuses on religious dress in immigrant communities. In addition, she has interned with several prominent organizations, including the Baker Institute of Public Policy, the Middle East Institute, and Google Inc., where she worked in public policy and government affairs to create geopolitical risk modeling tools.

Mohamad Halawi is a second-year medical student at Duke University. He graduated in 2005 from the University of Houston, summa cum laude, in biochemical and biophysical sciences. On graduation, he received a fellowship award at the NIH, training in the field of genomics. He is a co-author in two journal publications arising from that work. He is a Jack Kent Cooke Scholar, American Association for Cancer Research Thomas J. Bardos Scholar, and Merage Foundation for the American Dream Fellow. In 2005, he was named Golden Key’s International Student Leader of the Year. He plans a career in academic medicine, developing novel genomics-based therapeutics for musculoskeletal disorders and solid tumors while integrating these innovations into public policy. Mohamad was born in Lebanon and came to the United States on his own in 2000. He is a naturalized US citizen.

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