 
Shizuo Kuwahara
Sophie Shao
Eugene L. Podkaminer
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Three Yale students have received Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans, which support graduate study for accomplished young people who are immigrants to the United States or the children of immigrants.
Two of the Yale winners are pursuing careers in the music field -- Shizuo Kuwahara, a first-year conducting student at the School of Music, and Yale College senior Sophie Shao, a cellist who will continue her studies at the School of Music next year. The third winner is Eugene Podkaminer, who is in his first year of study at the Yale School of Management.
The Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships provide for one-half of the cost of graduate study at any institution of higher learning in the United States, as well as an annual maintenance grant of $20,000, for up to two years. The three Yale recipients were among 30 young people chosen from over 700 applicants to receive the awards in 2000, the program's third year.
"We founded the fellowship program to encourage people with demonstrated leadership qualities, much like the Rhodes scholarships," says philanthropist Paul Soros. "Our criteria are designed to identify people who will make a success of their lives and who will contribute something to this country, in whatever area of endeavor they choose." Winners are chosen by a panel of distinguished "new Americans."
Profiles of Yale's Soros Fellows follows:
Kuwahara, who is currently pursuing a master's degree in orchestral conducting at the School of Music, already has substantial experience wielding the conductor's baton.
Born in Tokyo, Japan in 1976, Kuwahara came to the United States at age 10. His interest in music began in junior high, when he took up the saxophone. By the time he graduated from high school, he knew he wanted to pursue a career in music.
Kuwahara earned his bachelor's degree in music in 1998 from the Eastman School, where he majored in music education and saxophone. While at Eastman, Kuwahara formed the Guild Orchestral Society, a volunteer student orchestra. Within three years, he had built the group into an 86-member ensemble with an extensive performance schedule. He was appointed assistant conductor of the Eastman School orchestras, and is associate coordinator of the Eastman Summer Seminar in Hamamatsu, Japan.
A semifinalist in the 1998 Prokoview International Conducting Competition in St. Petersburg, Russia, Kuwahara has gained additional conducting experince at institutes in South Carolina and in four summers at the Pierre Monteux School in Maine. At the Yale School of Music, Kuwahara is studying with Lawrence Leighton Smith. He will conduct the Yale Philharmonia in April.
A religion major in the Class of 2000, Sophie Shao already studies cello privately with Aldo Parisot at the School of Music, and will begin her work toward a master's degree there next year.
Playing the cello has long been a central part of Shao's life. She was born in New York City in 1977, but her mother soon took her back to their family's home in Taiwan. The family later moved to Houston, Texas in 1981. There, at age 11, Shao performed the Boccherini Cello Concerto with the Houston Symphony. She moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania when she was 13 to attend the prestigious Curtis Institute, where, four years later, she served as principal cellist of the Curtis Orchestra and recorded Andre Previn's "Reflections" for cello, English horn and orchestra for EMI Classics.
In 1996, she was accepted into the Chamber Music Society (of Lincoln Center) Two program "for brilliant young artists." Shao has performed at Merkin, Alice Tully and Avery Fisher halls in New York City; Suntory Hall in Tokyo; the Caramoor and Ravinia Festivals; and as a soloist with the Cayuga Chamber Orchestra and the Yale Symphony Orchestra. She has performed chamber music with such distinguished musicians as Andre Previn, Christoph Eschenbach and Ani Kavafian.
An M.B.A. student at the Yale School of Management, Eugene L. Podkaminer has been interested in the world of finance since high school.
Born in Odessa, Ukraine, Podkaminer was 2 years old when his family emigrated to San Francisco, California. Through the Academy of Finance at San Francisco's Lincoln High School, Podkaminer had internships at Smith Barney Shearson, where about fixed income offerings, and at Charles Schwab, where he mediated client/broker conflicts and developed automated networking scripts that reduced data entry errors.
In 1997, he graduated summa cum laude after three years of study from the University of San Francisco (USF). He subsequently worked as a portfolio accountant for Barclays Global Investors and as a financial consultant for Aeneid Corporation, both in San Francisco.
At Barclays, Podkaminer initiated and developed an Intranet tool that improved communication between departments and reduced valuation errors. At Aeneid, he overhauled the company's finance content catalog and changed its website to attract new customers.
Podkaminer's poetry appeared in a USF philosophical journal and anthologized in a new-poet journal. Since August, he has been one of six American M.B.A. students writing columns in the "Best B-School" section of BusinessWeek Online.
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