Two from Blaine win prestigious graduate scholarships for new Americans

Steven Truong and Philsan Isaak are two of the 30 national recipients of this year's prestigious Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans. And both hail from Blaine.

Truong, a graduate of Irondale High School in New Brighton, received a fellowship for his M.D./Ph.D. studies at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif. Isaak, who graduated from Spring Lake Park High School at 17 and the University of Minnesota at 18, received a fellowship for her studies at Yale Law School in New Haven, Conn.

The fellowships, established in 1997 by Hungarian immigrants Paul and Daisy Soros, provide up to $90,000 to help graduate students who are immigrants or children of immigrants. The 30 winners were selected from nearly 2,000 applicants in a process that prioritizes creativity, initiative and capacity for accomplishment.

Truong's parents were boat people who fled war in Vietnam, while Isaak's parents were refugees from the Isaaq genocide in Somalia. Both say they were motivated by their parents' experiences.

Truong's love of science started at the movie theater, where he and his dad would go at least once a week. "Interests in science fiction and fantasy, superheroes and all that kind of made me question myself: What actually is possible?" he said.

For Truong, 25, that means pushing the limits in both science and storytelling. As an undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he started a project to screen the genomes of Vietnamese people.

Anne Keirstead, a math teacher at Irondale, recalled the first time she realized Truong's ability. "Steven's the kind of student that comes along maybe once or twice in a teaching career," she said.

Truong enrolled in Advanced Placement (AP) Calculus I during his junior year but soon decided to transfer to AP Calculus II, which Keirstead was teaching. She and another math teacher decided to approve the switch if he could ace a practice test covering a full year of calculus. He did.

Truong decided he wanted to use his science skills to help people by treating diseases. He took a particular interest in diabetes, which affected his father.

"I remember him being so scared that he might die that he took me to Universal Studios, just so he could have his time with his son," Truong said. His father passed away while he was at MIT.

Doctors might miss warning signs of diabetes in Asian patients, Truong said. One study shows that doctors might not even screen them for it because they tend to look for diabetes in patients who weigh more. Even when Asian patients are diagnosed properly, treatments might not match a patient's needs, he said.

Yet no data had been collected on genomics among Vietnamese people, which could provide insights on how to treat diabetes and other conditions. So Truong approached MIT and proposed to screen the genomes of a few hundred people in Vietnam. Once the data is published, Vietnam will be "on the playing ground" of genomics research, Truong said.

Truong is pursuing an eight-year educational track at Stanford to earn both a doctorate and to qualify to practice medicine. But his first passion is still storytelling.

"I love movies too much," he said. "I want to be able to combine that with what I do in the lab and in the clinic. Hopefully what that translates to is, maybe one day I get to be a film director."

Isaak, 19, is a first-year law student at Yale and plans on a career in international human rights law. But she had no interest in law until one day when her parents were late to pick her up from high school and she ran into a friend who invited her to an info session for the debate team. She "fell in love with the program," she said.

Andra Lindquist, who became her speech coach, was immediately struck by Isaak.

"She was the coolest human being I had ever met," Lindquist said. "She would walk into my classroom and make everybody feel so comfortable and make everybody want to do great work. And then she would make you laugh about something absurd."

Isaak had planned to study science, but debate changed all that. She realized she enjoyed researching a topic, thinking critically about it, learning to argue both sides and speaking about her findings.

"At that point, it was incredibly clear to me that I had a skill set," she said.

She earned AP credits early in high school and then spent her last two years there enrolled full-time at the U through Post-Secondary Enrollment Options (PSEO). While taking classes at the U, Isaak started thinking about how international law applied to her own family's story. Her dream trial is bringing the perpetrators of the Isaaq genocide to justice.

For now, as a first-year law student, she's focused on building a strong skill set in writing and research. "You have to know the rules to play the game," she said.

The Soros fellowship will cut Isaak's school debt and allow her to explore lower-paying human rights fellowships, she said. She's also hoping to develop a community with her New Americans Fellowship cohort.

"We are all first-gen or immigrants and we bond on that front," she said. "We have shared traumas that I think other people often cannot understand."