MED Student Awarded Soros Fellowship
Eric Ding (MED’12) receives a Paul and Daisy Soros 2008 Fellowship for New Americans
Eric Ding (MED’12) immigrated to the United States from China when he was just five years old. Now, 19 years later, he is a naturalized citizen who has helped make advances in drug safety research and who has founded a nonprofit cancer campaign. For his initiative and commitment to American values, Ding recently received a Paul and Daisy Soros 2008 Fellowship for New Americans.
Ding was among 30 fellowship recipients chosen from nearly 700 student-applicants. The fellowship, which aims to prepare immigrants and their children to be leaders in their chosen fields in the United States, provides half of the tuition cost of graduate study for two years and a maintenance grant of $20,000 a year. The charitable trust was established in 1997 by Paul and Daisy Soros, immigrants from Hungary seeking to give back to the country that had given them and their children great opportunities.
As a doctoral candidate at Harvard University, where he earned dual doctorates in epidemiology and nutrition, Ding led a two-year investigation into the safety of the pain reliever Vioxx and its sister drugs, which drew national attention, and founded the Campaign for Cancer Research, which has more than three million members. The organization benefits the Nurses’ Health Study of cancer causes and preventions at Harvard Medical School. For Ding, the disease hits close to home. In high school, he was told he had five years to live after doctors found a tumor. But by his senior year, he was back on the cross-country and track teams as a varsity athlete.
Ding’s goal is to become a physician-scientist, with a focus on preventive and translational medicine.
Rebecca McNamara can be reached at ramc@bu.edu.
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