I grew up in Northville, a small town outside of Detroit, with my entire extended family nearby. My mom is a special education teacher, and my dad owns an electric motor repair shop. My sister, three years younger than me, is working as a teacher's assistant. I lived in the same suburban house for my entire childhood until I moved away for college, spending endless hours playing in the backyard with neighborhood friends. I was always drawn to math and science, loving multiplication tables and an astronaut mission during my early school days. Inspired by my grandma's knee replacements, I decided that I wanted to study biomedical engineering in college.

I moved into a Johns Hopkins University dorm in 2012, suddenly far away from my entire family. I quickly found a new community in Thread, getting to know incredible youth and families in Baltimore City. In addition to Thread, various clinical shadowing and research experiences piqued my interest in a future MD/PhD in oncology and immunoengineering. While applying to MD/PhD programs, I spent a gap year working a hodge-podge of social justice-related jobs: a research assistant at the Poverty and Inequality Research Lab, a Mentoring Specialist for the University of Maryland Baltimore CURE Scholars Program, and a Community Manager for Thread. By the end of the year, I decided that equity and population health needed to be at the forefront of my eventual career; I soon committed to an MD/PhD with no plan for my PhD.

I matriculated into the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences & Technology in 2017. Spending the majority of my time studying the basic science underlying medicine further fueled my desire to dive more deeply into the social sciences and social determinants of health. During my three-month surgery rotation, I witnessed enormous structural barriers to care, sparking an interest in health policy. I ultimately decided to pursue a PhD at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health to focus on population health, beginning during the fall of 2019.

Over the past few years, I have embarked on my journey to become an epidemiologist, researching racial disparities in the care of folks with advanced prostate cancer through a patient-reported outcomes framework. In addition to my epidemiology classes, I have taken courses in US health policy, health system innovation, and design in public health, as well as a month-long course in Chile on health reform and community medicine. I have participated in the Public Health Leadership Lab, honing my leadership skills and hosting a workshop on self-awareness in leadership during a student-led conference. I have flown to Nigeria and Jamaica to support the involvement of African and Caribbean medical centers in the IRONMAN prostate cancer registry. I've become more involved in the political side of health with Vot-ER and Future Doctors in Politics. I have had international trips in normal times and fancy stay-at-home dates during the COVID-19 pandemic with my husband, Kyle. Though I'm still not entirely sure where life will take me, these opportunities and the people around me enrich my life every day. Isn't that what matters most?