University of Pennsylvania Masters of Public Health

I am a recent graduate of the Penn Master of Public Health Program on the Global Health track. A first-generation, queer and non-binary student, I have become a strong advocate for the HIV community in Philadelphia through my work with the Penn Center for AIDS Research Community Advisory Board, something I continue to do even after graduating and moving back home to New York. During my time at Penn, I served on the boards of the Penn Public Health Society, the Penn Global Health Society, and the MPH Service Corps, and worked as a Graduate Assistant at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia Center for Injury Research and Prevention and as an Epidemiology Teaching Assistant for the MPH program. I took first place in the Healthcare Barriers Hackathon in 2023, hosted by Sidney Kimmel Medical College, and awarded the Shiriki Kumanyika Award for Public Health Leadership at my program commencement in 2023. I am currently a Research Program Coordinator at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, managing several neurosurgery clinical device trials aimed at improving health outcomes following interhospital transfers of patients experiencing neuro-emergencies, and am also a NextGen Emerging Leaders Fellow through NMAC (formerly known as the National Minority AIDS Coalition). I have just been awarded the Fulbright ETA Taiwan award for the 2024-2025 school year, where I will be teaching English to students in Taiwan to help reach the country’s goal to become a bilingual nation by 2030. Upon returning to the U.S., I plan to pursue a PhD degree in Epidemiology where I focus on the intersection of social determinants of health and infectious diseases, and build a career in academia.