Katherine Fang YC ’17 is among this year’s 30 recipients.
Katherine Fang, a Class of 2017 Yale College graduate who majored in global affairs and modern Middle East studies, is among this year’s recipients of the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans, a merit-based graduate school program for immigrants and the children of immigrants.
Thirty fellows nationwide were chosen from among a pool of 2,445 applicants for the fellowships, which provide up to $90,000 in funding to support their graduate study. Eligible “New Americans” include green card holders, naturalized citizens, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival (DACA) recipients, individuals born abroad who graduated from both high school and college in the United States, and the U.S.-born children of two immigrants. They were selected for their potential to make significant contributions to the United States.
Fang was born in Houston, Texas, where she was raised by parents and grandparents from China. Because of her family’s background, Katherine has long been dedicated to understanding issues of citizenship and political participation.
After graduating from Yale College, Katherine spent a year teaching English and working on refugee policy at the United Nations Development Program’s Middle East Regional Office in Amman, Jordan, as a Fulbright Scholar. She has also served as a speechwriter at the International Organization for Migration headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. Before entering law school, Katherine was an economics research associate at Harvard Business School, where she investigated issues of gender equity in the labor market. Since then, she has been interested in using quantitative methods to describe and address social issues.
As a joint JD/PhD candidate at Yale Law School and Yale School of Management, Katherine has pursued projects focused on access to public benefits and criminal justice reform. She co-runs the Capital Assistance Project, which pairs law student interns with legal aid organizations seeking to overturn the death penalty. Katherine is a research assistant at The Center for Law, Brain, & Behavior at Harvard, where she aids retired federal Judge Nancy Gertner in ongoing academic projects and in developing a training program to encourage federal judges to integrate scientific evidence on addiction and mental health into sentencing decisions.
In addition, she collaborates with California Supreme Court Justice Goodwin Liu on the Portrait Project 2.0, an empirical study into Asian American representation in law and politics. A former Kerry Initiative Fellow, she supported Secretary John Kerry in researching and organizing conferences on pressing international challenges. Recently, Katherine interned at the Georgia Justice Project in Atlanta, where she worked on an initiative to ensure COVID-19 relief checks remained in the hands of incarcerated individuals. Through the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship, she plans to continue studying how to build a more responsive, inclusive government.