Penn Medicine student awarded a 2026 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans
Medical student Bayan Galal has received the scholarship, which provides graduate school funding for immigrants and children of immigrants to the United States.
1 min. read
Medical student Bayan Galal is a recipient of the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans.
Galal is a second-year student pursuing an M.D. at the Perelman School of Medicine. She is among the 30 finalists chosen as 2026 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellows from more than 3,000 applicants. Each Fellow receives up to $90,000 for graduate studies.
Born in Prospect, Connecticut, Galal is one of five children of Egyptian immigrants. Growing up between the U. S. and Egypt, she saw how structural gaps in health systems followed families across different contexts. In Egypt, she witnessed relatives navigate chronic illness in fragmented settings with limited resources. In high school, she served as an emergency medical technician, caring for patients whose vulnerabilities mirrored those she had seen abroad. Those experiences inspired her commitment to strengthening health systems for underserved populations, both domestically and internationally.
At Penn, Galal has led the United Community Clinic, served as a Perry World House graduate associate, and founded Providing Access to Health, a health navigation program supported by the University’s Projects for Progress initiative. Her research focuses on global health, including as a research fellow with the Harvard Health Systems Innovation Lab. She is national chair-elect of the student branch of the American Association of Medical Colleges, representing nearly 100,000 medical students nationwide, and is co-author of a chapter in a forthcoming textbook on leadership in academic medicine.
She earned her bachelor’s degree from Yale, studying molecular biology and global affairs, and her master’s degree in population health sciences from the University of Cambridge as a Marshall Scholar.
Penn physicists led by Bo Zhen have created hybrid light-matter particles that interact strongly enough to compute, pointing toward ultrafast, low-energy optical AI hardware.
Penn’s newest supercomputer is transforming research
Penn’s first campus-wide HPC and AI cluster, “Betty,” is expanding access to powerful computing, enabling groundbreaking projects, and fostering new collaborations across disciplines.
A bioengineered bean gum from the lab of Penn Dental’s Henry Daniell is found to reduce the levels of three microbes associated with head and neck squamous cell cancer to almost zero, without affecting the beneficial bacteria normally found in the mouth.
Fighting oral cancer with bioengineered chewing gum
Research led by Penn Dental’s Henry Daniell shows that antiviral and antibacterial chewing gums reduce the levels of three microbes linked to worse outcomes in oral cancers, paving the way for more effective and affordable therapies.
The performing arts at Penn: Process, practice, and purpose
In the vivid tapestry of performing arts groups at Penn, students prepare for their performances while simultaneously enriching their college experience.
