Princeton graduates Max Gotts and Dora Zhao receive Soros Fellowships for New Americans

Princeton alumni Max Gotts, Class of 2024, and Dora Zhao, Class of 2021, were awarded the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans, a merit-based graduate school program for immigrants and children of immigrants. Soros fellows receive funding to support their graduate studies at institutions across the country and are recognized for their achievements and their potential to make meaningful contributions to the United States across many disciplines. This year, 30 fellows were selected from over 2,600 applicants.

Gotts, whose family immigrated to the United States from the United Kingdom, majored in ecology and evolutionary biology and minored in astrobiology and mathematics. He was a 2023 Udall Scholar, a 2020 Gold Presidential Service Awardee and an associate member of Sigma Xi. He was also named a recipient of the 2023 Becky Colvin Memorial Award, which supported his senior thesis research on poison-dart frog acoustic evolution. He will use the grant to support his work in a Ph.D. program in ecology and evolutionary biology at Cornell University.

Zhao, the daughter of Chinese immigrants, majored in computer science with certificates in Asian American studies and statistics and machine learning. She also completed her master’s in computer science at Princeton. Zhao researched racial bias in image captioning techniques and helped develop a globally sourced object recognition dataset. This experience inspired her to explore broader challenges in dataset collection, such as improving dataset reliability and validity. The grant will fund her as she pursues a Ph.D. in computer science at Stanford University.