Malcolm McDonald Fellowship

The McDonald Fellowship is named in honor of former YAANW president and longtime board member Malcolm McDonald '58. For 50 years, Malcolm served as the Alumni Schools Committee chair for St. Paul, greater MN, and western WI. In this role, he welcomed hundreds of future Yalies at events for admitted students. In 2019, Yale Admissions honored Malcolm with the ASC Ambassador Award. Malcolm graduated from Yale magna cum laude and received an MBA from Harvard before returning to his hometown, St. Paul. He was involved in numerous Minnesota community organizations throughout his life and was passionate about expanding educational opportunities to all.

What: A $6,000 fellowship awarded to one to two current Yale students to support or supplement an opportunity that enriches the student’s education.

Purpose: The goal of the Malcolm McDonald Fellowship is to enrich a Yale student’s learning while exploring our region’s rich civic, cultural, corporate, natural, or political dynamics. This grant aims to retain or attract Yale talent to the region, to foster a positive, shared learning experience among the awardees, and build a sense of community among the YAANW region. The YAANW region consists of Minnesota, eastern North Dakota, eastern South Dakota, and western Wisconsin.

Eligibility:  Any current Yale undergraduate student is eligible for this award (up to $6,000 per student) if the project proposed is region-focused and/or is being enacted by a Yale student from the region. The grant funds can be used for anything related to the project such as stipends for interviewees, subscription to an archive vault, airfare ticket for an international internship, living stipend while conducting research, etc. The Fellowship Committee of the YAANW Board will administer the award and select the recipient. Applicants who have applied in the past are encouraged to apply again.

Application Requirements: 

Applications are accepted on a rolling basis until all grants are awarded. The committee will begin reviewing applications on April 1, 2026. Please submit your application by April 1 for priority consideration.

Fellowship Recipients

Naysa Kalugdan ’27

Pauli Murray College

Major - Molecular, cellular, developmental biology

This summer I have the pleasure of participating as a summer research assistant for the Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD) project and the Center for Evaluation & Survey Research (CESR) in Bloomington, Minnesota. With the VSD project, I will be studying vaccine monitoring systems and investigating the association of chronic urticaria and COVID-19 vaccinations by leading the validation and literary analysis of an algorithm using large-scale healthcare data. Additionally, I will be supporting a systematic review of the use of clinical simulation in labor and delivery training. Between both projects, I will have the opportunity to collaborate with several interdisciplinary teams and members, and contribute to projects dedicated to improving healthcare quality and safety. Through these experiences, I am excited to engage with patient advocacy, education, and healthcare support by contributing to research that supports evidence-based medical practices, strengthens public health initiatives in the YAANW region, and promotes safer patient care for communities across the Midwest.

Fateya Omer ’26

Pauli Murray College

Major - History of Science Medicine and Public Health

This project is a primary research study of the Oromo community in Minnesota and in Ethiopia. The Oromo community in Minnesota is a displaced community that depends not only on formal health systems but also on cultural institutions for mental support. This project involves oral histories, interviews, and ethnographic fieldwork and research to analyze how the Oromo diaspora understands and maintains their mental and emotional well-being through cultural systems of care (religion, language, communal and cultural gatherings, etc.) that exist in both diaspora and homeland environments. Ultimately, the project aims to create new understandings of mental health and public health that exist beyond Western medical traditions to support the fields of medical anthropology and diaspora studies.

Bridgitte Thao ‘27

Berkeley College

Major - Sociology

Bridgitte Thao is a rising senior in Berkeley College majoring in Sociology at Yale University. As a recipient of the YAANW Fellowship in 2025, she devoted her summer to exploring research techniques and methodologies that she had learned about in the classroom--but had never had the opportunity to apply in the real world. With mentorship from her professors, Bridgitte designed and conducted a pilot interview study with first- and second-generation Hmong Americans from Minnesota and Wisconsin on the economic development of their local communities. Bridgitte is fascinated by questions about materiality, immigration, and history. Her summer 2025 project focused on the socio-economic networks that Hmong Americans developed as a result of cross-cultural labor contexts within the Midwest landscape. Without the support of the YAANW fellowship, she would not have been able to integrate the experiences of research subjects from across the Midwest. Since Bridgitte started this project, she has continued to develop her skills for qualitative data collection and analysis. In the future, she hopes to pursue graduate studies focusing on the socio-cultural interactions between immigrant communities within the American Midwest context. Bridgitte hopes that her scholarship will contribute to a wider body of national discourse on immigration that emphasizes the vibrancy and multiplicity of the Midwest that often gets overlooked.