Mercer Times

Princeton alumni Max Gotts and Dora Zhao have received the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans. This prestigious merit-based fellowship supports the graduate studies of immigrants and their children in the United States. Gotts, who graduated in 2024, and Zhao, who graduated in 2021, are recognized among 30 fellows selected from over 2,600 applicants this year.

Max Gotts, whose family immigrated from the United Kingdom, graduated with a major in ecology and evolutionary biology, and minors in astrobiology and mathematics. His achievements include being a 2023 Udall Scholar and a 2020 Gold Presidential Service Awardee. He was also honored with the 2023 Becky Colvin Memorial Award, supporting his research on poison-dart frog acoustic evolution. Gotts will use the fellowship to support his Ph.D. studies in ecology and evolutionary biology at Cornell University.

Dora Zhao, the daughter of Chinese immigrants, earned her bachelor's degree in computer science, complemented by certificates in Asian American studies and statistics and machine learning, followed by a master's degree in the same field. Her research on racial bias in image captioning techniques and efforts in developing a globally sourced object recognition dataset have driven her to address challenges in dataset reliability and validity. Zhao will pursue a Ph.D. in computer science at Stanford University with the help of the fellowship.