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Alumna, Senior Selected for New Quad Fellowship in STEM Fields

New competitive scholarship comes from partnership of U.S., India, Australia and Japan

One Duke alumna and a Duke senior have been named in the inaugural class of Quad Fellows, a new scholarship that provides funding for graduate research in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM).  This scholarship is supported by the governments of the United States, India, Australia, and Japan. 

Alumna Raahina Malik, and current senior Jenny Huang will be a part of a cohort of 100 masters and doctoral STEM students studying in the United States. The fellowship develops a network of science and technology experts committed to advancing innovation and collaboration in the private, public, and academic sectors, in their own nations and among Quad countries. The program builds foundational understanding among Quad fellows of one another's societies and cultures through cohort-wide trips and programming with each country's top scientists, technologists and politicians.

Each Quad fellow will receive a one-time award of $50,000 which can be used for academic expenses. All Quad fellows are eligible to apply for separate demonstrated needs-based funding of up to $25,000 to cover costs related to completing graduate-level studies. Fellows will also take part in a residential experience designed to deepen their understanding of topics at the intersection of STEM and society.

Malik graduated from Duke in 2020 magna cum laude with a degree in neuroscience and minors in psychology and global health. She is currently employed at RTI International, where she assists with public health and user experience research on projects for the CDC, NIH, and FDA. At Duke she was a Rubenstein scholar, researched in a computational neurogenetics lab, studied abroad in two countries, and worked on a Bass Connections neurosurgery and neuroscience team.  Malik will use her fellowship to pursue a master’s degree in human-computer interaction.

Huang will graduate this spring with degrees in statistics and computer science and a minor in math. At Duke, Huang studied various aspects of infectious disease modeling, including fluctuations in disease transmissibility, ICU occupancy and COVID variant competition.  She is the recipient of the 2022 Faculty Scholar Award. Huang will use her award to begin her doctoral studies in statistics this fall.

For more information about the Quad Fellowship, visit the Quad Fellowship website.