Two Indian Americans, one Pakistani American named recipients of George J. Mitchell Scholarship

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Two Indian Americans along with a Pakistani American have been named recipients of the George J. Mitchell Scholarship program.

According to a U.S.-Ireland Alliance press release, Indian Americans Keshav Goel and Rohan Naik, and Pakistani American Minhal Ahmed were among 12 scholars to receive the George J. Mitchell Scholarship.

Goel is biology and economics major at Williams College, Massachusetts, who has conducted research on ailments that disproportionally affects the world’s poor as he notes how socioeconomic inequality is one of the greatest public health concerns in the United States today.

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Goel is from Northern California.

According to his bio on the Alliance’s website, he co-authored his first published clinical paper on the automated detection of congenital heart defects in newborns and is currently conducting a yearlong senior biology thesis to uncover the mechanisms of asthma, which largely affects impoverished children.

He has also conducted health economics research with Harvard Medical School to assess the quality and effectiveness of federally funded clinical trials.

Goel is an aspiring physician, who will study immunology and global health at NUI Maynooth.

Naik is a journalist and researcher who is currently working on an upcoming Netflix documentary series about the 14th amendment.

He is from Houston, Texas and graduated from Yale University earlier this year, where he worked as a reporter for the Yale Daily News and at the New Haven Independent, according to his bio on the Alliance’s website.

He was also an intern at the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting and ProPublica where he researched and reported stories about air pollution in London, as well as how police in the U.S. respond to hate crimes.

As the head peer liaison at the Asian American Center at Yale, he created programming around the stigmatization of mental health issues and directed one of the university’s largest mentorship programs.

In addition, he was also selected by Yale to conduct a sexual violence prevention program and he also founded a gun buyback program, while working with the city of New Haven.

Naik is interested in researching how society remembers and constructs the past and will study public history at Queen’s University Belfast.

Ahmed immigrated to the United States from Pakistan at age four, and attended five schools in five years before his parents settled in New York.

He soon became interested in how our bodies and health are impacted both by our genes and our zip codes.

Now, he is a bioengineering major at Northeastern University in Boston, and focuses his research on the gut microbiome, the trillions of microorganisms that live in our intestine, studying how the ecosystem in our gut may affect how we think and feel.

Outside of the lab, Ahmed works with Peer Health Exchange, a national organization that seeks to bring health equity to under-resourced schools by providing health education, accoridng to his bio on the Alliance’s website

A record number of 370 people applied for the Scholarship program, which sends future American leaders to the island of Ireland for a year of graduate study.

The program was created by the founder and president of the U.S.-Ireland Alliance, Trina Vargo, and is named in honor of Sen. George Mitchell’s contributions to the Northern Ireland peace process.