Fourth-Year Ph.D Candidate, Biomedical and Biological Science

My priorities for the Board of Trustees:

I am running to be your Graduate and Professional Student Elected Trustee to help make Cornell the best it can be for all community members. To promote this goal, I consider the top 3 priorities for the Board of Trustees to be as follows: 

1. Transparency: Leadership of any organization begins and flourishes with trust. Currently, trust between students and administration/trustees is low, with broad community desires like Divestment seemingly making little headway in Board deliberations. I will advocate for a regularly published Trustee Newsletter to increase transparency and the context of decisions to all Cornell stakeholders. I will also push for regular interactions of Board leadership with the shared governance structures to hear and respond to ongoing issues. 

2. Community: I will seek to improve the positive community at Cornell by creating Trustee engagement with the grad student worker union. I will also advocate to provide additional funds to community-centered organizations such as the Big Red Barn, the Food Pantry, and the Office of Inclusion and Student Engagement. 

3. Academic Excellence: The reason people come to Cornell is to be trained at an excellent academic institution. Maintaining the ability of graduate and professional students to receive this expectation is paramount. This includes ability to have safe, modern infrastructure, ample parking, and clear academic expectations. I will work with Trustees and the Graduate School to ensure these goals.

My Experience:

I have been at Cornell for 3 years. I know the issues, I been advocating for our community since the beginning, and I have a network of supportive faculty and administrators. I have been involved in shared governance at Cornell since I arrived in 2021. I have been a club representative, voting member, Programming Board Chair, and most recently President of the Graduate and Professional Student Assembly. In these roles I fought for grad student access to parking permits, equity for students on fellowships, and increased funding opportunities for grad student organizations. I have also been on the University Assembly and numerous campus-wide committees, where I have advocated for grad and professional student issues to admin, faculty, and staff. This includes promoting free expression with the Campus Committee on Expressive Activity.

My Interests:

As soon as I arrived at Cornell, I knew that I wanted to immerse myself in the communities here. I joined clubs like Graduate Women in Science and the MAC Peer Mentoring Program to meet people and help transition into graduate school. To give back to those same communities I have been a mentor and a leader within my department and the university as a whole. I am a communicator at heart, and the lack of awareness around campus resources has also been a key issue for me. I have used communiques and slack groups to spread knowledge of the Access Fund, the Ombuds Office, Careers Outside Academia, and Cornell Outdoor Education. So few in our community know about or take advantage of these opportunities, and I plan to continue my efforts to make them more accessible to all.