Vivasvan Vykunta
Vivasvan Vykunta (’20, MCB) was born in Berkeley, California to parents who immigrated from India. Vivasvan is currently in the Medical Scientist Training Program (MD-PhD) at UCSF and studies fundamental mechanisms that regulate how immune cells detect and respond to target proteins, hoping to apply this deeper understanding to develop more effective therapeutics. As an undergraduate at UC Berkeley, Vivasvan studied Molecular and Cell Biology with an emphasis in Immunology. He credits the supportive mentors he found at Berkeley–Astar Winoto, Robert Beatty, and Lok Siu, among many others–for nurturing his […]
Su Kim
Su Kim (’18, Geography) was born and raised in Los Angeles to immigrant parents from South Korea. At UC Berkeley, she earned her B.A. in geography with departmental high honors and a minor in global poverty and practice. While a student, she interned with local abolitionist organizations Justice Now and Californians United for a Responsible Budget, and studied Spanish and Mexican history in Mexico through the Autonomous University of Social Movements. As a Robert and Colleen Haas Scholar (’17-18), she conducted independent research under the supervision of Professor Victoria Robinson, […]
Freja Ekman
Freja Ekman (’18, Chemical Biology) was born in Erlangen, Germany, to parents from Sweden and Norway. Her family immigrated to San Diego, California when she was five. Freja is currently in her second year of an MD-PhD in genetics at Stanford University. She is interested in developing new genome editing tools for the treatment of hematological diseases and rare genetic diseases. As an undergraduate at UC Berkeley, Freja studied chemical biology, with the hope of understanding how to harness basic chemical principles to better characterize the behavior of genetic mutations […]
Andrew Lu
Andrew Lu (MCB, ’17) was born in Taiwan and raised from a young age in Houston, Texas. He is currently in the third year of the UCLA-Caltech Medical Scientist Training Program (MD-PhD). He is specializing in the rapidly growing field of synthetic biology, building artificial cell behaviors to better understand design principles of natural systems. Andrew discovered and embraced his life’s work as an undergraduate at UC Berkeley, after taking a leave of absence after his sophomore year to evaluate his original plan to major in Computer Science and work […]
Maribel Patino
Saul Ramirez
Hari Srinivasan
Hari Srinivasan (Psychology/Disability Studies, ’22) maintained a 4.0 GPA at Cal while writing regular columns and articles for The Daily Californian, teaching a popular and impactful DeCal class on autism, running Team Propaganda for the makerspace Berkeley Disability Lab, serving in leadership roles in Spectrum: Autism at Cal, and, as a senior, conducting independent fully funded research on the emotion of awe as a Haas Scholar. Outside of academia, Hari has been invited to join the boards of several national advocacy organizations, and was selected to serve on the NIHs […]