Grenadian American Makes History With $90,000 Graduate School Fellowship

By NAN STAFF WRITER

News Americas, NEW YORK, NY, Fri. April 15, 2022: A Stanford MD/PhD student has made history by becoming the first Grenadian-American to receive a prestigious $90,000 graduate school fellowship.

On April 13th, the premier graduate school fellowship for immigrants and children of immigrants, The Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans, announced their new class of Fellows, each of whom will receive $90,000 in funding towards their graduate education.

The new class includes Quenton Rashawn Bubb, who is the first recipient with Grenadian heritage in the Fellowship’s 24 year history to win the Fellowship.

Quenton was born in Brooklyn, New York to Jude and Jessey Bubb, who emigrated from the island of Grenada to seek greater educational and career opportunities for themselves and their future children. With a mother as a nurse, and a father as a musician and electrician, Quenton loved to listen to his heartbeat with his mother’s stethoscope and take apart his toys with his father’s tools. His home life deeply influenced Quenton’s appreciation for interdisciplinary thinking from an early age. He credits his parents for seeding his love of jazz and improvisational music, which inform his creative thinking and scientific exploration.

As a college student at Johns Hopkins, Quenton studied biophysics, with the hope of gaining proficiency in mathematics, computation, chemistry, biology, and physics to address challenging problems in medicine. In the laboratory of Professor Karen Fleming, he learned and applied fundamental biophysical techniques to probe protein thermodynamics. After graduating Phi Beta Kappa from Johns Hopkins, he was able to continue his education in molecular biophysics by pursuing an MPhil in chemistry at the University of Cambridge as a Marshall Scholar, where he studied the complex kinetics and thermodynamics of intrinsically disordered proteins.

After graduating from the University of Cambridge, Quenton worked as a fellow at Vida Ventures, where he learned about a broad range of biotechnologies and current challenges in cutting edge medicine. He subsequently began training toward becoming a physician-scientist in the Stanford University School of Medicine Medical Scientist Training Program (MSTP), where he is also pursuing an MD and PhD in stem cell biology & regenerative medicine. Under the co-mentorship of Professor Agnieszka Czechowicz and Professor Crystal Mackall, he is developing a toolbox of novel cell therapies to allow patients with hematological diseases or malignancies to undergo Hematopoietic Stem Cell Transplantation (HSCT) without genotoxic conditioning. Quenton hopes to be a hematologist/oncologist and lead an interdisciplinary lab dedicated to developing curative cell and gene therapies as a principal investigator. He intends to support and develop trainees from underrepresented and marginalized backgrounds to make significant impacts in science and medicine.

In addition to Quenton, the Fellowship selected Christeebella Akpala, Esther Elonga, Tania Fabo, and Osaremen Fortune.

In addition to receiving up to $90,000 in funding, the new Fellows joins the prestigious community of past Paul & Daisy Soros Fellows. The active alumni network includes US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy; Olympians Amy Chow and Patricia Miranda; US Ambassador to Spain Julissa Reynoso Pantaleón; business leader Sangu Delle; former California Surgeon General Nadine Burke-Harris; Stanford AI leader Fei-Fei Li; computational biologist Pardis Sabeti; composer Paola Prestini; Maine CDC Director Nirav Shah; Aspiration CEO Andrei Cherny; award-winning writer Kao Kalia Yang, and more than 715 Fellows.

Founded by Hungarian immigrants, Daisy M. Soros and her late husband Paul Soros (1926-2013), The Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans program honors the contributions of continuing generations of immigrants in the United States.

“The Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship liberated me from the traditional path I was expected to follow,” said 2009 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow Shantanu Gaur, the cofounder and CEO at Allurion Technologies. “Unburdened from debt and energized by peers who were taking the road less traveled, I have been able to thrive.”