Nafisa Syed grew up in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, where she read almost everything she could get her hands on. She had her first experiences with journalism and with the real-world scientific process in high school, producing a radio documentary with her local NPR station and helping excavate human bone in a bioarcheology lab. She graduated from MIT in 2019 with a double-major in Biology and Brain and Cognitive Sciences. While a college student, she became the first editor of The Tech’s Science section, worked in a neurolinguistics lab studying how the brain produces and interprets language, and spent a semester interning at NOVA Next. As an aspiring health professional and writer, Nafisa hopes to use her time in the graduate program to become well-versed in writing about public health and medicine so that she can effectively use her communication skills to serve the public.