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Health & Fitness

Harker Alumnus Awarded $90k Fellowship for Yale Medical School

Daniel Kim ‘09 has been awarded a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans up to $90,000 for his work towards study in Medicine at Yale.He is one of thirty winners in a national competition that attracted more than twelve hundred applicants.

 These awards are of special note because they honor and support young New Americans:  immigrants and children of immigrants.

Each year the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship Program recognizes, honors, and supports thirty New Americans who seem best positioned to use their graduate training in this country to prepare them to make distinctive contributions to American life.

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The son of Korean immigrants, Daniel moved to California with his parents when he was seven. His grandfather was a farmer, and his father was the first in his family to get a college education. Growing up in Silicon Valley, Daniel admired his father’s meticulous approach to his work as a semiconductor engineer.

Daniel entered his undergraduate career at Harvard determined to make a difference in health care. He served as co-president of both Harvard College Red Cross and Team HBV, a group that educates the Asian and Pacific Islander community in Boston about the hepatitis B virus.

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As his passion was taking shape, though, Daniel took a leave of absence from school to take care of his father who was battling cancer.

Realizing that research was a crucial tool in improving patients’ lives, Daniel met his father’s doctor and arranged to work in her laboratory. Though he hadn’t previously done biomedical research, he was soon overseeing a study repurposing the antifungal agent itraconazole as a targeted therapy for skin cancer.

After his father’s health returned, Daniel went back to Harvard with renewed ambition. Daniel is applying to joint MD/PhD programs and looking forward to a career as a physician-scientist involved in the fight against cancer. Heartiest congratulations on the award!


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