Battlefield prompts study in medical field
Rice alumna wins Soros Fellowship for New Americans

BY JESSICA STARK
Rice News staff

Though she has spent less than a decade in the United States, Rice alumna Dania Daye is making contributions to the country that most Americans work a lifetime toward. Currently working on a patent for a technique she developed for noninvasive quantification of hepatic collagen concentration in liver fibrosis, Daye ’07 has earned a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans.

DAVID GRAHAM Dania Daye ’07 has earned a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans.

One of 31 fellows selected from about 750 applicants, Daye will receive a $20,000 grant and half the cost of her graduate program tuition. Daye is pursuing combined degrees in medicine and in engineering at the University of Pennsylvania.
 
Her up-and-comer status in the medical imaging field is a far cry from the battlefield she grew up on. Daye was born amidst the civil war that raged in Lebanon from 1975 to 1990. Her passion for medicine arose from a childhood spent watching injury and death tolls climb.

“The hospital was the first place I saw anyone trying to help others, and I quickly came to view doctors as role models,” Daye wrote in her application essay.

The Soros Fellowship builds on Daye’s commitment to excellence. She was also recently awarded a prestigious grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She is one of only nine students to receive that honor and is using that fellowship to pursue research into new medical imaging technologies that she began at Rice.
 
“Rice provided me with a number of opportunities to develop many fundamental skills in both research and patient care,” Daye said. “I definitely look back at my experience in the lab through the Rice Undergraduate Scholars Program as one of the forming experiences that shaped the way I currently approach any research question in the lab. I would not be currently looking at filing a patent on one of my research projects from this summer, if it wasn’t for my undergraduate research experience at Rice.”

At Rice, she majored in bioengineering and graduated magna cum laude with election to Phi Beta Kappa. She also worked closely with Rebecca Richards-Kortum, Rice’s Stanley C. Moore Professor of Bioengineering and professor of electrical and computer engineering. Daye said the lab experience and relationship with Richards-Kortum were influential in her pursuits.

She also served as the Rice Emergency Medical Service operations lieutenant, supervising 22 EMTs and maximizing the efficiency of the organization. Daye also led an initiative that increased the number of public defibrillators on campus from four to 20.

“Being able to do this at the same time as research on campus tremendously shaped the way I look at science and medicine,” Daye said. “It allowed me to see them as two entities on a continuous spectrum, if not a continuation of one another. Medicine helps individual people while research helps people on a global level.”

Daye’s successes and future plans made her an ideal candidate for the Soros Fellowship, which aims to highlight the contributions of new Americans to the United States. The Soroses, Hungarian immigrants and American philanthropists, established the fellowship program in 1997 because they wished to give back to the country that had afforded them and their children such great opportunities. They also felt that assisting young new Americans at a critical point in their education was an unmet need.

Soros Fellowships are awarded to new Americans — resident aliens, naturalized U.S. citizens or those who are the children of two parents who are both naturalized citizens. The grants are intended to support individuals who are loyal to their country of origin but who will continue to regard the United States as their principal residence and focus of national identity.

“Through this scholarship, I am hoping to be able to pursue interdisciplinary research at Penn,” Daye said. “In medicine, there often seems to be a gap between the physicians and the techniques that physicists and electrical engineers develop. With this scholarship, I am hoping to be able to serve as a bridge between some disciplines that don’t regularly communicate.”

Though she has settled well into her life as a graduate student, Daye looks back on her Rice days fondly and is willing to share the secret of her success with fellow Owls.

“Rice is a place where there are lots of opportunities for anyone that seeks them out,” she said. “My advice for any incoming freshman is to be proactive and ambitious, because there are no limits to the things that you can do while at Rice. One of the most unique aspects of the Rice experience is the fact that you can optimize and personalize your experience, both inside and outside the classroom, to make of yourself the perfect candidate for whatever will come next.”