Sraavya Sambara

Sraavya Sambara is an undergraduate student at Harvard College in the Class of 2024 intending to study History and Science with a secondary in Global Health and Health Policy. Through her internship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies and CrisisReady, she is researching the optimal policies for the use of aggregated mobility data in disasters and public health crises through a series of exploratory seminars, as part of the World Bank’s Global Facility for Disaster Risk Reduction (GFDRR) global consultation process.

She is an active member of Harvard’s Institute of Politics as the Senior Culture Editor for the Harvard Political Review, where she contributes cultural analysis, art reviews, and interviews with prominent individuals. Within the IOP, she is also a teacher for CIVICS, a program which strives to empower elementary school students through civic education. She is a liaison for the Harvard College Women’s Center, and is involved with a variety of South Asian activities on campus. Through her work with the UCSF Health and Human Rights Initiative, she hopes to advocate for migrant health justice through research and policy work.

In 2019, she received the Arthritis Foundation Grant Award to research the role of Natural Killer Cells in combatting Human Cytomegalovirus through the Blish Lab at Stanford University. She presented this research to faculty within the Stanford University School of Medicine. Concurrently, she was a research associate at the Rothfels Lab within UC Berkeley’s Department of Integrative Biology, where she studied evolutionary biology, computational biology, and plant systematics.

She has received numerous awards for her journalistic work, including first place in Youth Journalism International’s prestigious annual contest and the Best of Show award from the National Scholastic Press Association for her profile writing and investigative work on affordable housing and school district strikes within the Bay Area. She was recognized by Teen Vogue as a young pioneer in journalism for this work and more. In pursuing her passion for teaching, she has created youth mentorship programs for journalism and biology within the Bay Area, as well as a narrative writing program for youth in Uganda through the nonprofit organization Children of Grace.

She hopes to explore her dual interests in global health, journalism, and politics through exciting interdisciplinary projects at CrisisReady.