Daye wins Soros Fellowship for New Americans

Though she has spent less than a decade in the United States, Rice alumna Dania Daye is already making contributions to her adopted country. Now 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.

One of 31 fellows selected from 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 engineering at the University of Pennsylvania.

Daye was born in Lebanon during the civil war that raged in that country from 1975 to 1990.

“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 has also received a grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She is one of nine students to receive that honor and is using the fellowship to pursue research into new medical imaging technologies that she started 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, Daye majored in bioengineering, graduated magna cum laude and was elected 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 led an initiative that increased the number of public defibrillators on campus from four to 20.

Jessica Stark, Rice News