UCI student selected for fellowship

Michael Miller

Jeff Sheng, a Master of Fine Arts candidate in studio art at UC

Irvine, was one of 30 students chosen this year for the Paul and

Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans.

Sheng, 24, who was born to Taiwanese parents and lives in Thousand

Oaks, has published photographs in Out magazine, the New York Times

Magazine and the Boston Globe. He received his bachelor’s degree,

magna cum laude, from Harvard University and also spent a year on a

Harvard-Yenching Fellowship at Peking University in China.

“This candidate truly exemplifies the kind of creative,

multi-talented, and extraordinarily accomplished new American that

Paul and Daisy Soros want to honor and support through this program,”

Warren F. Ilchman, director of the fellowship program, said in a

release.

Nearly 1,000 American college students, who must be naturalized

citizens, resident aliens or children of naturalized citizens,

applied for the Soros Fellowship this year. Recipients of the award

receive up to a $20,000 stipend plus half of tuition costs for up to

two years’ graduate study at any American college.

The Soros Fellowship was founded in 1997 by the Soroses, a pair of

Hungarian immigrants who wanted to aid students of foreign origin.

Sheng marks the third UC Irvine student to win the fellowship.

History major Mia Ching Lee received it in 2000, and biology major

Erick Ruiz Miranda won two years later.