Wasting no time

Six short years ago, first-year medical student Arash Fereydooni was studying the Los Angeles Times, cover to cover, nearly every day. He needed to expand his vocabulary—stat. Fereydooni had emigrated with his family from Iran to California at the start of his junior year. He was failing all his classes at El Camino Real High School. But he buckled down to learn English, his third language after Persian and Arabic. By the end of his senior year, Fereydooni graduated at the top of his class with honors in math, science, and English.

With those laurels barely on his head, he moved to New Haven and pursued dual B.S./M.S. degrees in molecular, cellular, and developmental biology at Yale College. Fereydooni graduated in four years cum laude, with academic distinctions in his major. Between schoolwork and research, he founded a nongovernmental organization called International Aid Organization, sponsored in part by the United Nations Refugee Agency, to support Syrian refugees financially and to fund service trips to visit Syrian refugee camps in Turkey. (The organization’s activities are currently on hold as the group prepares to fundraise to “become bigger and more active,” Fereydooni said.) He also volunteered at Yale-New Haven Hospital and helped local refugees learn English and obtain health care. For two years, on the side, he taught the physics behind robotic designs to students at local high schools and contributed several articles to the student-run Yale Scientific Magazine. Beginning in 2012, he joined Paul Forscher, Ph.D., professor of molecular, cellular, and developmental biology, in the lab to research neurobiology. Fereydooni has received five research fellowships during his time in Forscher’s lab, to study the effects of serotonin on neuronal growth.

Earlier this year, officials at the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans chose Fereydooni as one of 30 recipients of its prestigious award to promising students. It was the spring of his senior year at Yale College and he was waiting callbacks from medical schools. He’d picked up the phone expecting a call from a med school. “It was a shock,” Fereydooni said. The award, given only to graduate students who are immigrants or children of immigrants, covers tuition and living expenses for two academic years.

Reflecting on his journey from immigrant to new American, Fereydooni described two themes in his life: innovation and service to others. As a high school junior, Fereydooni approached his physics teacher with a design to make remote-controlled drones more energy-efficient by allowing the rear wings to turn independently of each other. Soon he had patented his first device. “That showed me that ideas don’t have to just remain ideas,” he said. During his senior year of high school, he was elected captain of the robotics team. Under his leadership, the team won a national competition and took second-place at an international one. “That was a very meaningful experience because it was my first time taking up a leadership role,” Fereydooni said. When he arrived at Yale, he continued this tradition of serving his peers through his work on class council boards. This fall, Fereydooni was elected co-president of the first-year class. And he still makes time to pursue inventions as co-president of the Yale Biomedical Innovation Club. Three summers ago, he received two international fellowships to help researchers at Heidelberg University Hospital in Germany develop a robotic surgery system that measures an organ’s length using stereoscopy. “Every maneuver is a small opportunity for creativity,” he said, adding that surgery, with its melding of machinery and human touch, is a specialty that appeals to him.

He hasn’t settled on a specialty yet, but Fereydooni has kept his focus laser-sharp on helping others. This past fall, he had a 10-minute meeting with U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, M.D. ’03, M.B.A. ’03, during an event at the Soros Foundation headquarters in New York City. Murthy is a 1998 fellow. During that discussion, he told Murthy about the advocacy work he and fellow classmates have pursued as members of Yale’s chapter of Physicians for Human Rights. “In a sense, [the fellowship] has given me a new sense of responsibility to strive harder, to work harder,” Fereydooni said. “I have to give back.”