3 FilAms named 2024 Paul & Daisy Soros fellows

The Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans, a merit-based graduate school program for distinguished immigrants and children of immigrants, has announced their class of 2024 fellows. This year, 30 applicants were selected from a pool of more than 2,300 applicants and will each be awarded up to $90,000 in funding to support their studies at the nation’s top institutions.

Of the 30 fellows selected, three of them are Filipino Americans: Ananya Agustin Malhotra, Hannah Keziah Agustin, and Celine Calpo.

The class of 2024 joins the ranks of notable alumni like U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, Paola Prestini, who was named by NPR as one of the “Top 100 Composers in the World,” and Damian Williams, the first Black U.S. attorney to represent the Southern District of New York. 

Founded by Hungarian immigrants and American philanthropists Daisy M. Soros and her late husband Paul Soros in 1998, the program has provided more than $80 million in funding and awarded more than 800 fellows from 105 countries to pursue the graduate degrees of their choosing. 

Ananya Agustin Malhotra

Fellowship awarded to support a JD at Yale

Born and raised in Georgia, Ananya Agustin Malhotra is the daughter of immigrants from Obando, Bulacan, Philippines and New Delhi, India. Raised in a bi-cultural and interfaith household, Ananya is deeply motivated by her mother and father’s family histories to advocate for a more just and peaceful future United States foreign policy.

Ananya’s interests lie at the intersection of global history, international law, and peace and security issues. She graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Princeton University with a concentration in the School of Public and International Affairs. Her undergraduate thesis, based on oral histories with New Mexican Downwinders, explored the human legacies of the 1945 Trinity Test and the U.S. nuclear age. At Princeton, Ananya served as president of the Sexual Harassment/Assault Advising, Resources, and Education (SHARE) Peer Program, where she was first introduced to survivor-centered advocacy.

As a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford, Ananya earned an MPhil in modern European history with distinction, studying the histories of empire and anticolonialism in shaping international order. For the last four years, Ananya has advocated for nuclear disarmament and risk reduction through her research, scholarship, and public commentary. Ananya has worked in Washington, DC at the Nuclear Threat Initiative and at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft to advance policies aimed at fostering a safer and more peaceful world.

Hannah Keziah Agustin

Fellowship awarded to pursue an MFA in literary reportage at New York University

Born and raised in Manila in the Philippines, Hannah Keziah Agustin is the daughter of Ilocano parents who went from the barrio to the city to pursue opportunity—which was also what made her family immigrate to Wisconsin in 2019. These journeys have deeply shaped the stories that Hannah writes about as a journalist, essayist, and poet.

When Hannah moved to the United States, she was 18 and wanted to tell stories that liberated the people around her, especially migrants like her who grappled with the challenges of their new world. This pushed her to double major in English and film studies, researching narratives of colonialism, exile, and the diaspora. As an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin–Whitewater, she was an active member of the University Honors Program, the Southeast Asian Organization, and The Muse, her university’s literary journal, where she was the nonfiction editor. Hannah wrote essays and poems that were later published in renowned literary magazines like North American Review, Electric Literature, and Michigan Quarterly Review.

Writing about her experience as an immigrant, she was the recipient of the 2023 Clayton Prize for Emerging Poets from Michigan Quarterly Review, the 2022 W.W. Norton Writers Prize for Nonfiction, and the 2021 Bernice Slote Award for Emerging Nonfiction Writers from Prairie Schooner. She is a freelance journalist who covers events in Southeast Asia for Christianity Today,with a recent article being about the effects of church scandals on the faith of Gen Z Filipinos.

Celine Calpo

Fellowship awarded to support work towards a JD

Celine Calpo hails from “the most southwesterly city” in the United States—Imperial Beach, California. Her father, Vito, is a former Overseas Filipino Worker who now works as a hotel houseman on the U.S. Naval Base in Coronado (North Island); her late mother, Whelma, was a former fire department dispatcher within U.S. Naval Base Subic Bay and a janitor at Jack-in-the-Box.

Her parents inspired cultural appreciation, intellectual curiosity, creativity, and moxie in many ways: encouraging lessons in Filipino martial arts (escrima) taught by her uncle, Grandmaster Bert Labitan,  watching “Jeopardy!”as a family, and introducing her to photography through an old 35mm film camera. In turn, she assisted her parents in completing government forms, taught them computer skills, and apprised them of developments in American culture and politics.

Celine graduated as salutatorian of Mar Vista High School’s class of 2015 on top of managing her diabetes, caring for her mother through life-threatening illnesses, and navigating college admissions as a first-generation, low-income student. She attended Georgetown University on a full scholarship, was inducted into the Georgetown Scholars Program, and graduated with a BA in American Studies.

As the program specialist for the International Office of the Federal Judicial Center—the research and education agency for federal courts—Celine manages and writes pieces for a website on comparative judicial practice, Judiciaries Worldwide, and facilitates exchanges between federal judges and their foreign counterparts.