6 HMS Students Receive Soros Fellowships

Born into a family of Sri Lankan Tamils, Anurudran’s family moved from England to Malaysia to the United States. While living in many diverse homes, Anurudran found community, inspiration, and purpose in connecting with women around her. Through their stories, Anurudran began to understand the universal roots of gender injustice and became committed to advocating for women everywhere.

Anurudran has partnered with diverse communities to implement violence prevention strategies. In 2016, she founded a sexual violence prevention program for adolescents in Kenya, which has trained more than 2,000 students in 10 primary schools. In 2020, she spearheaded the COVID-19 Taskforce on Domestic Violence, a nonprofit to investigate, educate, and advocate on behalf of survivors. From designing a database of domestic violence resources to launching over 20 educational seminars, she led a task force of 117 activists to increase survivors’ access to safety.

In 2020, Anurudran graduated first in her class from the University of Cambridge in the U.K. with an MPhil in public health. She then worked at the Stanford Intimate Partner Violence Research Laboratory before starting at HMS.

Growing up in Barranquilla, Colombia, Liimakka says she would spend many days sitting on the city’s sidewalks while her mother visited hospitals as a sales representative. The sidewalks became Liimakka’s front-row seat to health care’s systemic inequities, as she would watch people turned away from care because of their inability to pay, leaving her with a deep discomfort that sparked her interest in health care.

Liimakka moved to the U.S. after high school to attend Columbia University, where she studied biomedical engineering. In college, she conducted research in musculoskeletal mechanics and was recognized with the Excellence in Biomedical Engineering award. Liimakka was elected as the first representative for disability and accessibility of the Engineering Student Council, working alongside the university senate to improve accessibility in learning spaces. She also worked as a Spanish medical interpreter in Harlem and the Bronx.

At HMS, Liimakka was awarded the Dean’s REACH Scholarship for her commitment to helping the medically underserved. Her proposed diagnostic for prosthetic joint infections, developed alongside Professor Laura Donlin, was published in the Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery and cited in the New England Journal of Medicine

Huerta Lopez spent her early childhood in the rural countryside of El Zapote de Cuendeo in Michoacan, Mexico. Poverty and the lack of medical infrastructure made access to health care and education nearly impossible and eventually led Huerta Lopez and her family to immigrate to the United States when she was six years old.  Her family settled in New Jersey, where their legal status limited access to dignified working conditions, health care, and education. Her parents worked low-wage factory jobs and their resilience inspired in Huerta Lopez a resolve to advocate for undocumented immigrants and patients.

Huerta Lopez’s fascination with nature as a young child developed into a love for science and discovery. After obtaining an AA in biology at Essex County College, she went on to receive the Jack Kent Cooke Scholarship and transferred to the University of Pennsylvania where she obtained a BA in biology. At Penn, she studied the molecular and cellular mechanisms that control enteric nervous system development and the genetic basis of Hirschsprung’s disease. Her work was published in the journals Gastroenterology and Developmental Biology. While at Penn, Huerta Lopez worked at Puentes de Salud Health Clinic to provide improved health literacy and access to medical care for undocumented immigrants without health insurance.

While at HMS, Huerta Lopez co-founded Quetzales de Salud, a nonprofit organization that aims to improve access to primary medical care for undocumented immigrants through medical accompaniment. She was awarded the HMS Dean’s Community Service Award in recognition of her work though Quetzales de Salud during the pandemic. She is currently a graduate student in the Biological and Biomedical Sciences Program at HMS, where she investigates the neurobiology of sensory perception with the support of her research mentor, Stephen Liberles.

Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, Mallipeddi is the son of immigrants from Andhra Pradesh, India. With his parents working full-time, he was sent to live with his grandparents in Andhra Pradesh for three years when he was young? When he rejoined his parents who had relocated to the San Jose Bay Area, he learned to greatly appreciate both his family’s courage and the crucial support provided by thriving immigrant communities.

As an undergraduate at UCLA, Mallipeddi pursued projects in biology and public policy, including discovering a groundbreaking function of histone proteins as copper reductase enzymes; building a policy framework to understand how disabilities are defined and operationalized; and developing public policy programs that provide employment opportunities to persons with disabilities in Los Angeles.

After graduating, he pursued a Fulbright Scholarship in India, where he assessed metrics across access to care, physical health, and mental illness among persons with disabilities. 

Mallipeddi is currently an MD student at HMS and an MBA student at Stanford Graduate School of Business. He is pursuing solutions that can impact the lives of persons with communication disorders. As a person who stutters, Nathan founded Myspeech, an international nonprofit organization that utilizes technology to connect people who stutter with resources across speech therapy and community services. To date, Myspeech has helped 25,000+ people who stutter in more than 25 countries. 

Mallipeddi is also an avid investor and researcher. As a founding investor of VANA Capital, Nathan sourced multiple investments in the biotechnology space. The author of 10 publications, Nathan’s research has been published in academic journals, including Science, Science Advances, Nature Biotechnology, Journal of Fluency Disorders, and Autism in Adulthood.

Meng grew up in the suburbs of Boston, with parents who preserved family traditions and the Chinese language at home. An experience with a misdiagnosis of appendicitis at age 10 inspired her commitment to understanding and integrating different healing traditions to improve patient outcomes. Graduating with highest honors in the history of medicine at Harvard College, she researched the use of acupuncture by revolutionaries of color in the 1970s for her senior thesis, which later became her first publication in the American Journal of Public Health.

Meng is documenting the history of the Black Panther Party’s trip to China in 1972, which resulted in the Panthers integrating Western and Chinese medicine in their community health care. Meng also traces the global legacies of an acupuncture treatment for addiction started in the South Bronx by Mutulu Shakur, which led her to the University of Cambridge for her master’s degree to study the use of acupuncture in the British prison system.

Meng is dedicated to accessible scholarship, having created short films and curated exhibits to bring her work to a larger set of audiences. She applies historical lessons to the present day, founding the Small Steps Project to promote accessibility to integrative medicine and the Harvard/MIT Equitable Access to Research Training (HEART) MD/PhD summer program to increase the diversity of the physician-scientist workforce.

Mohanty was born in Durham, North Carolina, to parents who had immigrated from India to pursue academic research careers in biology. His family moved to Charleston, South Carolina, when Mohanty was 2 years old. Growing up in Charleston, Mohanty pursued classical and jazz music, composing, arranging, and playing saxophone and piano, and he developed an interest in scientific research.

Accepted to Harvard College at age 15, Mohanty graduated in 2019 with a master's degree in chemistry, a bachelor’s degree summa cum laude in chemistry and physics, and a minor in music. While at Harvard, he was also inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa academic honor society as part of Harvard's Junior 24 and received a 2018 Barry Goldwater Scholarship for his physics research. As an undergraduate and master’s student, his published research papers spanned a number of interdisciplinary topics across the sciences and music.

Mohanty received a Marshall Scholarship in 2019 to pursue a PhD in theoretical physics at the University of Oxford’s Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics. He received his first PhD (DPhil) in 2022, having submitted his dissertation, “Robustness of Evolutionary and Glassy Systems,” in under two years, at the age of 22.

Mohanty’s current goal is to extend his physics-based theories of evolution to understand how molecular-level structural changes in proteins can induce changes in evolutionary fitness of viruses and cancers. He aspires to develop novel therapeutic approaches to combat diseases subject to evolution on fast timescales and to treat patients with such diseases.

As a composer, Mohanty’s national award-winning large wind ensemble and chamber works have been published by JPM Music Publications (Missouri), Lighthouse Music Publications (Ontario, Canada), Radnofsky-Couper Editions (Massachusetts), and C.L. Barnhouse Publications (Iowa), and are distributed and performed regularly around the U.S. and in many parts of the world. He also actively performs as a jazz pianist around the U.S.