Three Iranian-Americans, Keyan
Salari, K. Cyrus Habib and Shelli Farhadian, and are among thirty-one finalists
in the tenth annual
competition for the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans. These Fellows are among thirty-one
finalists in the tenth annual competition for the Paul & Daisy Soros
Fellowships for New Americans.
Keyan Salari
KEYAN SALARI is a joint MD/PhD candidate at
Stanford
University. He has
completed two years of medical school and is currently in the first year of a
PhD program in Genetics. MR. SALARI
is a 2004 graduate of the University of
California, Berkeley, where he earned
a BA with honors and high distinction in Molecular and Cellular
Biology.
Now 24 years old, MR. SALARI was born in Lansing, Michigan. Both of his parents come from small,
rural towns in Iran. They arrived in
America in the 1970s with few
financial resources, but were given the opportunity to pursue graduate school in
chemistry and became teachers. MR.
SALARI's own interest in science was sparked by early visits to his parents'
chemistry labs and the evening courses his father taught at the local community
college. The family now resides in Cupertino, CA.
MR. SALARI plans a career as a
physician-scientist-educator, with the goal of becoming a leader in cancer
research and oncology, and a dedicated educator and mentor. He finds that the
ever-increasing volume of information generated as a result of advances in
genomic technologies has made the field of cancer genomics more
interdisciplinary in nature, and so he has located his research at the
intersection of genetics, computer science, and statistics. Upon graduating from
Stanford, MR. SALARI plans to
complete a residency in general surgery and a fellowship in surgical oncology.
MR. SALARI's research includes work with
professors at Berkeley, the University of California at San Francisco, and Stanford. MR. SALARI has published twelve
conference papers and seven peer-reviewed scientific articles. He was awarded
Berkeley's
Spencer W. Brown Award for the best undergraduate research conducted in
genetics, and was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Biology Fellow. He is
currently President of the Stanford Medical Student Association.
