Siona is pursuing an MD at Harvard Medical School to study medicine and technology. She graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College and studied Computer Science with a secondary focus in Global Health and Health Policy. As an undergraduate she received the Davidson fellowship and Coca Cola scholarship.  

Over the past two years, Siona has worked on a research-based tech initiative to improve outcomes for women suffering from surgical site infections after C-sections, the leading cause of maternal mortality in low- and middle-income countries. She helped build the machine learning algorithm responsible for predicting infection risk based on a smartphone image of the surgical site. By making wound screening low-cost and accessible at home, she hopes to reduce barriers to receiving critical follow-up care. She also worked on Project iSense: a climate initiative to pinpoint and reduce greenhouse gas emissions in cities. Over the past 7 years, she implemented a system of low-cost CO2 sensors on nine drones and cell-phone towers in Washington DC to identify emissions hotspots. She now works with the EPA and NOAA to use these inventories to inform local policy.  

To Siona, innovation in medicine is less about the most cutting-edge solutions, and more about ways to help existing treatments reach those populations that need it most. As she pursues her MD, she hopes to continuously find ways to leverage technology to build holistic, implementable solutions that improve access and quality of care in low-resource settings. 

Siona grew up in the suburbs of DC. She loves rock climbing, non-fiction books, and farmers markets. Growing up, she played tennis competitively and danced.