The fourth immigrant to make Popular Science's Brilliant 10 list is Yoky Matsuoka, a Japanese native who is a robotics expert at the University of Washington in Seattle. Matsuoka was a promising young tennis player in Japan interested in turning professional, but injuries forced her to look at alternative careers. And that is good news for rest of us. Matsuoka, who also received a MacArthur genius grant, is pioneering research in to controlling devices through signals from the brain. She's now applying this research in creating an artificial hand controlled directly through brain impulses.
St. Lucia native Derek Walcott is the 1992 Nobel Prize winner with a long and successful body of work that includes dozens of books of poetry and twenty plays mostly dealing with life in the Caribbean. An exception to this is his 1997 collaboration with Paul Simon on the Broadway play The Capeman, about the life of a Puerto Rican gang member in New York. I happen to own the CD for that show and remember being struck by the poignancy of the lyrics. But I never paid attention to who the lyricist was. While the show was not a hit, the Paul Simon CD Songs from The Capeman is one I've enjoyed over the years.
Canadian actress Neve Campbell was a very successful teen actress who has now transformed her image and is taking on serious roles on stage and in film. She became well known as Julia Salinger on the television series Party of Five and then went on to star in the Scream horror film series. She went on to star in critically acclaimed films like Panic, with William H. Macy, and The Company, directed by Robert Altman. She recently made her West End stage debut in Arthur Miller's Resurrection Blues.
There's a decent chance you're viewing this post in part due to the genius of Intel's Vinod Dham. The Indian-born Dham received an electrical engineering masters degree from the University of Cincinnati and then started his career at NCR. He later joined Intel and is credited as the "father of the Pentium processor." He left Intel in 1995 and helped found NexGen, a company acquired by the other big chip giant AMD.
Now that's an odd combination! But Brazilian-born Indianapolis 500 winner Helio Castroneves is one of America's top car racers and is also one of the three remaining contestants on the current run of ABC's Dancing with the Stars. Good luck Helio!
[Update - Congrats on winning, Helio.]
About The Author
Greg Siskind is a partner in Siskind Susser's Memphis, Tennessee, office. After graduating magna cum laude from Vanderbilt University, he received his Juris Doctorate from the University of Chicago. Mr. Siskind is a member of AILA, a board member of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, and a member of the ABA, where he serves on the LPM Publishing Board as Marketing Vice Chairman. He is the author of several books, including the J Visa Guidebook and The Lawyer's Guide to Marketing on the Internet. Mr. Siskind practices all areas of immigration law, specializing in immigration matters of the health care and technology industries. He can be reached by email at gsiskind@visalaw.com.
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