Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States
Environmental Health Sciences major, Arabic minor. Published research on Samoan ethnopharmacology. Patient care assistant passionate about ensuring equitable healthcare access to all. Varying language experience in Spanish, Arabic, Samoan, and Chinese. Knowledgeable about NC native plants and wildlife. Morehead-Cain Scholar at UNC Chapel Hill, C. Ritchie Bell Award 2024, Alice Rowan Swanson Fellow 2025 at the School for International Training. UNC Health Humanities Journal published researcher.
As president of the Gardening and Ethnobotany in Academia project, I manage relationships between the Project and the student body. My primary responsibility is planning events to engage organization members and the general UNC student body. These include gardening days, native plant lectures, educational plant medicine workshops, and more. I also share financial responsibilities for the organization with the treasurer, such as funding requests through student government and appropriately allocating funds to different events. Collectively, we manage the medicinal gardens behind the Health Sciences Library for the Gillings School of Public Health.
I am a regular patient care assistant for patients with neurodegenerative diseases and dementia, both old and young. I ensure patients can feel comfortable in their own homes by helping with activities of daily living such as eating, cleaning, enjoying the outdoors, hygiene, and more. I prioritize their safety but also mental well-being, making sure to use gentle words and respect their boundaries. Everyone deserves dignified, respectful care in sickness and in health, and I make sure this is the case with my patients.
I am an undergraduate student at UNC Chapel Hill majoring in Environmental Health Sciences and minoring in Arabic and Asian Studies. I am a part of Honors Carolina.
As an intern at Wild at Heart Legal Defense Association, I wrote a case study on the effects of planting mangroves outside of their native range and how these effects impact the fishing communities and endemic biodiversity in central Taiwan. This case study emphasized the importance of planting certain species exclusively within their native range to control spread, and related environmental impacts back to proposed a policy by Taiwan's Ministry of Environment that would allow companies to plant mangroves for carbon credits. I also attended hearings at the Ministry of Environment in Taipei, wrote presentations on ecosystem valuation and mangrove planting/removal, examined ecosystem valuation in the context of Taiwanese mud flats, attended a conference on wind farms off the Taiwanese coast, and visited the Matsu Dolphin Ecology Center in Changhua to learn about their invasive mangrove removal efforts.
As part of a team of four interns at The Birmingham Promise, I helped design a free after-school program for students whose families were lacking access to affordable after school programs at Booker T. Washington K-8 school. This program created partnerships with local organizations in various fields to expose children to potential future career paths. My team created this program in an attempt to address an age gap in the cradle-to-career pipeline for Birmingham Public School students. The Birmingham Promise's greater mission is to provide city school students in Birmingham with a wide variety of opportunities, the most notable of which being access to job opportunities and internships, and up to four years of tuition assistance to any public university in Alabama.