Three recent Hunter alumni are being tapped to follow in the footsteps of a 1930s City College alumnus who made an outsized impact on the world.
The alumni — Haya Alkiswani ’24, Darvin Huang ’23, and Nawshin Maleeha ’24, all Macaulay Honors College students — have won three of the eight $8,000 scholarships that CUNY awards annually in honor of the late Jonas E. Salk CC ’34, who developed the first polio vaccine in 1955.
Salk turned down a ticker tape parade for his discovery and asked that the money instead be used for scholarships for graduates based on their potential to make significant contributions to medical research. The polio vaccine Salk developed has saved millions of lives in the last 70 years.
The Salk Scholarships are awarded annually to graduates of CUNY’s senior colleges who have been accepted by, and plan to attend, U.S. medical or graduate schools. The awards are based on academic performance, especially scientific research that the students have conducted as undergraduates. Since 2017, 18, 29 of the 64 Scholarships awarded have been to Hunter students, illustrating Hunter’s commitment to providing world-class, high-impact research opportunities to its diverse students.
Alkiswani, a John P. McNulty Scholar, majored in biological sciences. One of 20 valedictorians in her graduating class, she worked at Weill Cornell in the Nociari Lab while at Hunter.
Maleeha, a psychology major who also was a valedictorian in 2024, was in Hunter’s strong behavioral neuroscience concentration. A student in Hunter’s National Institutes of Health-funded BP-Endure Program, she researched in Ekaterina Likhtik’s lab.
Huang, who majored in biochemistry and minored in economics, works as a research technician in Columbia’s Kang Miller lab.
