OURS National Scholarships

Freja Ekman (’18, Chemical Biology) was born in Erlangen, Germany, to parents from Sweden and Norway. Her family immigrated to San Diego, California when she was five. Freja is currently in her second year of an MD-PhD in genetics at Stanford University. She is interested in developing new genome editing tools for the treatment of hematological diseases and rare genetic diseases. As an undergraduate at UC Berkeley, Freja studied chemical biology, with the hope of understanding how to harness basic chemical principles to better characterize the behavior of genetic mutations […]

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Andrew Lu (MCB, ’17) was born in Taiwan and raised from a young age in Houston, Texas. He is currently in the third year of the UCLA-Caltech Medical Scientist Training Program (MD-PhD). He is specializing in the rapidly growing field of synthetic biology, building artificial cell behaviors to better understand design principles of natural systems. Andrew discovered and embraced his life’s work as an undergraduate at UC Berkeley, after taking a leave of absence after his sophomore year to evaluate his original plan to major in Computer Science and work […]

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Hari Srinivasan (Psychology/Disability Studies, ’22) maintained a 4.0 GPA at Cal while writing regular columns and articles for The Daily Californian, teaching a popular and impactful DeCal class on autism, running Team Propaganda for the makerspace Berkeley Disability Lab, serving in leadership roles in Spectrum: Autism at Cal, and, as a senior, conducting independent fully funded research on the emotion of awe as a Haas Scholar. Outside of academia, Hari has been invited to join the boards of several national advocacy organizations, and was selected to serve on the NIHs […]

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Maribel Patino (’14, MCB, with emphasis in neurobiology) conducted her honors thesis in the lab of Prof. Daniela Kaufer studying the relationship between traumatic brain injury and epilepsy. She graduated with high distinction and was awarded the department’s I.L. Chaikoff Memorial Award. She went on to work at the University of Pennsylvania in the lab of Professor Edward B. Lee through the NIH Postbaccalaureate Research Education Program, studying the role of a repeat expansion mutation in the development of neurodegenerative diseases. Maribel received the Soros Fellowship Fellowship to support work […]

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Saúl Ramirez (’16, Chicano Studies/Ethnic Studies) minored in education and global poverty and practice. His multidisciplinary undergraduate training culminated in an honors thesis that analyzed Central American unaccompanied immigrant minors’ experiences, and his legal internships during college cemented his desire to pursue law. He aspired to mitigate the immigration- and criminal-law-related consequences he witnessed his loved ones and community enduring and went on to earn his JD from Yale Law School in 2019. The Soros Fellowship will support his work toward a PhD in Sociology at Harvard. Wishing to eradicate mass […]

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