Duke alumna Antonina Vykhrest has been named one of 30 recipients nationwide of the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans.
The Soros Fellowships, established in 1997, award $90,000 to immigrants and children of immigrants to complete graduate studies in the United States. Applicants may propose graduate work in any discipline, and are selected based on their potential to make significant contributions to American society, culture or their academic field. This year’s winners were selected from a pool of 1,767 applicants.
Vykhrest, a 2010 Duke graduate, immigrated to the United States when she was eight from Ukraine. Inspired by this experience and her grandparents’ stories of Soviet and Nazi oppression, she was drawn to understanding social change across communities and countries.
At Duke, Vykhrest studied human rights movements, obtaining degrees in political science and international comparative studies. Working with the Center for Race Relations, she supported the undergraduate community in exploring issues of gender, race and sexuality.
After working with the women’s rights movement in Mexico as a Service Opportunities in Leadership Scholar, she pursued a master’s in international law of human rights and criminal justice at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. In 2014, she returned to Ukraine as a Fulbright Fellow to research women’s access to justice and sexualized violence in connection with the armed conflict in eastern Ukraine.
After joining the Council of Europe, an inter-governmental organization, Vykhrest worked with mostly post-Soviet countries to develop and support implementation of better laws in the areas of human rights, rule of law and democracy.
She cofounded ACCESS, an NGO that bridges the gap between grassroots organizations and international institutions.
She will be pursuing an MBA at Harvard Business School to explore social innovation and digital transformation tools that allow civil society to rapidly mobilize in quickly changing environments.
The 2019 fellows, who are 30 or younger, come from a wide range of socioeconomic backgrounds, and are all naturalized citizens, green card holders, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients or the children of immigrants. Their backgrounds reflect much of the diversity of recent immigrants and refugees in the United States. Vykhrest joins 15 other Duke alumni who have been awarded this fellowship in the past.
Hungarian immigrants Daisy M. Soros and Paul Soros (1926-2013) founded the program in 1997. A complete list of this year’s fellowship winners can be found at www.pdsoros.org