Alumni Directory Display

Shivani Radhakrishnan ’07 hails from Mt. Hope, NY. Her academic interests include philosophy, classics, and religion. Outside of the classroom, she enjoys dancing with Kalaa, being a fellow in the James Madison Program, and tutoring with the Student Volunteers Council. In her free time, Shivani likes to knit, watch Jimmy Stewart movies, and read outdoors. Shivani is excited to spend her summer in Uganda learning about the role of culture in international development.

Kamila is originally from Uzbekistan and at the age of 6, her family immigrated to Queens, New York City. Kamila graduated from Princeton University in May 2021 with a degree in medical anthropology and a minor in global health and health policy. While at Princeton, she focused on studying infectious diseases in low-resource settings. This interest first developed during her study abroad program in India, after her first year. Her experience in Sonipat, India was formative and pushed her to explore the understanding of care in low-resource environments. Kamila has interned at Zithulele Hospital on the Eastern Cape of South Africa in a tuberculosis research study. There, she conducted quantitative research on the diagnoses and outcomes of tuberculosis patients and witnessed the burdens of infectious disease on the well-being of the Xhosa population. Additionally, she worked with researchers at the University of Malaya to conduct qualitative research trying to understand consistent condom usage in intimate partners of HIV-positive men who inject drugs, one of the country’s most vulnerable groups. Kamila wrote her senior thesis on the syndemic relationship between Covid-19 and tuberculosis on the Eastern Cape of South Africa. On campus, Kamila was a leader trainer and Wilderness First Aid instructor and coordinator for one of the largest outdoor action orientation programs in the country and works closely alongside the directors to update curriculum and developmental leadership goals. She is excited to continue working in public health and low-resource care as a Princeton in Africa Fellow Baylor International Pediatric AIDS Initiative.

Alumni Update:

Krishnan has stayed in Africa, and has been based in Tunisia for the last three years working as a Regional Livelihoods Officer with UNHCR. He supports a number of different UNHCR offices in Francophone Africa to improve their partnerships and programming aimed at increasing refugees’ access to sustainable livelihoods in their countries of asylum.

Fellow Bio:

Krishnan is from Portland, OR and studied French and Spanish language and literature at Haverford College. His interest in international development grew out of time spent abroad, first as a student in Aix-en-Provence, France then as a youth development volunteer in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and after graduation, spending a year as an English teacher at a university in Bangkok, Thailand. Since returning to the U.S., he has been working in the IRC’s refugee resettlement office in San Jose, CA and is looking forward to learning more about the IRC’s international work with its Somalia programs office. He is particularly excited to be able to contribute to Somalia’s development at such a critical juncture in the country’s history. While living in Nairobi, Krishnan hopes to learn Swahili and explore the great Kenyan outdoors as much as possible.

Alumni Update:

Meredith is currently living in Brooklyn, NY where she lead sales and marketing at Soko, a social enterprise startup that uses technology to empower artisan entrepreneurs in Kenya. After almost two years in NYC, she’ll be moving to San Francisco in June, where she’ll continue her work at Soko. She looks forward to returning to Africa this fall to work with their team in Nairobi (and meeting their inaugural PiAf Fellow!).

Fellow Bio:

Meredith graduated with majors in Public Policy and International Comparative Studies with an Africa concentration. A native Californian from Palo Alto, she is proud to have also called Boulder, Paris, New York City, and Durham, NC home over the past four years. At Duke, Meredith served on the honor board of her sorority, Delta Gamma, and dabbled in West African dance and Afro-Cuban percussion. A former intern at a peanut butter company, she is excited to add the African Cashew Alliance to the list of nutty places she’s worked. Meredith looks forward to the next year of exploring a new culture, eating lots of mango, and dancing on many of Ghana’s beaches.

Aishwarya graduated from Seton Hall University with a bachelor’s degree in Economics. In 2022, she graduated from Yale University with a master’s in International & Development Economics. She wrote her master’s capstone on the impact of economic sanctions on political rights and civil liberties of recipient countries. At Seton Hall University, she served as an Editor in Chief of the University’s business newspaper. At Yale University, Aishwarya worked at the Lowenstein Project, a human rights clinic in the Schell Center for Human Rights at Yale Law School. She served on a project regarding water access in Palestine. Most recently, Aishwarya interned at Education Cannot Wait (ECW), a fund hosted by UNICEF that seeks to provide education in emergency and protracted-conflict zones. At ECW, Aishwarya worked in the Risk and Child Safeguarding unit, analyzing ECW’s portfolio risk, and evaluating the risks surrounding the fund’s grants. Furthermore, she assisted with drafting the fund’s policies for child safeguarding and prevention of sexual exploitation and abuse. Aishwarya has worked at the United Nations Office of the High Representative for Least Developed Countries, Landlocked Developing Countries, and Small Island Developing States, and helped co-author a paper on the impact of COVID-19 on landlocked developing countries. She has also worked at Ernst & Young, a public accounting firm, as a consultant in Transfer Pricing and International Strategy. She enjoys photography, dancing, playing the guitar, hiking, baking, writing prose, tango, and learning about people’s lives. She plans to dedicate her career to international development and humanitarian assistance.

Ellie graduated from the College of William and Mary, where she studied Public Policy and Africana Studies. At William and Mary, Ellie volunteered with adults with developmental disabilities at the Arc of Greater Williamsburg, and mentored recently-arrived migrant students adjusting to the local middle school.  Her experience in East Africa began when she spent a summer traveling in Uganda before college. She then returned to serve as an Education and Communications Intern for the Maendeleo Foundation, a social enterprise providing digital literacy and entrepreneurial skills training to clients in Mukono, Uganda. In this role, she produced external communications and contributed to grants-based funding applications for the Foundation.  Ellie’s undergraduate research was executed in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, where she spent four months conducting ethnographic fieldwork with Maasai labor migrants. Her honors thesis explores the social networks that arise to mitigate the risks of both voluntary migration and forced displacement for pastoralist populations in Tanzania. In preparing for her research and during her time in Dar, Ellie honed her Kiswahili skills and developed her interest in the effects of national-level public health and economic policy making on marginalized communities in Tanzania.

Alumni Update:

Amanda has begun a new career chapter as an environmental data scientist with Bayer Crop Science. As an environmental data scientist she designs her goals around global impact so that locations around the world have access to the latest data and models available to make improved decisions in the agricultural sector.

Fellow Bio:

Amanda (Princeton ‘11) is a Mechanical Engineer from Trinidad and Tobago. At Princeton, she was a Residential College Advisor for Rockefeller College, OA leader and member of the Cap and Gown Club. She earned a certificate in the Program in Sustainable Energy and hopes to pursue a career in this field. While at Princeton, Amanda has done extensive research in the Princeton Combustion laboratory on alternative fuels and renewable energy under the advisorship of Professor Frederick Dryer, and hopes to continue research in this field in graduate school. While in Kenya next year, she plans to take her engineering and sustainable energy skills to the field while working in Nyumbani Village in order to gain some real world experience. Along the way she hopes to pick up some of the local languages, learn to cook a lot of the food and absorb as much of the diverse culture Kenya has to offer as she possibly can.

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Raquel Ramirez is a 2024 graduate of Princeton University with a degree in the School of Public and International Affairs and certificates in both Theater and Gender and Sexuality Studies. As a San Diego native with family on both sides of the US/Mexico border, she understood the importance of cross-cultural connection to facilitate understanding, tackle international problems, and grow together. She is passionate about studying that connection through the arts. At Princeton, she worked on a dozen plays and musicals through the Lewis Center for the Arts, centering Latinx voices and stories. In 2022, she led Princeton Summer Theater’s post-covid season as its Executive Director, raising money, directing a team of 40 individuals, and drawing audiences back after two closed seasons. For her senior thesis entitled Drag Dissent, she explores the role drag performance played as a form of performance protest in the past and what space it occupies today. She is also a proud dancer in Más Flow, Princeton’s only Latinx dance group, and an avid recreational tennis player. She is excited to be a Princeton in Africa Fellow this year, teaching Research Methods and Theater at USAP Community School.

Alumni Update:

Jillian is currently a project coordinator at The Ohio State University College of Nursing, where she manages an NIH-funded project seeking to reduce cardiovascular disease risk in young black adults through a culturally and environmentally tailored mobile health program. She recently completed a Certificate in Public Management and began her MPH where she will focus on global health and health policy.

Fellow Bio:

Jillian, a native of Baltimore, Maryland, graduated from the University of Virginia with a dual degree in Global Development Studies and English Literature. While at UVa, Jillian was a member of the University Guide Service, a Rotunda Student Ambassador, and the Head Manager for the Varsity Women’s Volleyball Team. Since 2016 she has led an action-based research project investigating the use of public health models in alleviating youth violence in a township outside of Cape Town, South Africa. She and her research partner are currently writing a paper suggesting a complimentary use of contagious and chronic disease models in conceiving of youth violence in order to design effective and sustainable community-based programs to combat consequences and implications of youth violence. For this work, Jillian and her team were recipients of a Davis Projects for Peace Award, multiple UVa research grants and awards, and were participants in the Clinton Global Initiative University conference in 2017. Through her internships, Jillian has developed a passion for using data storytelling to empower traditionally marginalized populations, while also creating layered narratives of impactful work for both donor and internal facing communications. Jillian is excited to explore the global development field and all that Tanzania has to offer in her role on the External Affairs team at CCBRT.

Lavina is from Chicago, IL and is a 2014 graduate from Texas Christian University. Lavina majored in Biology and minored in Chemistry and Business. While at TCU, Lavina worked as a Resident Assistant on campus, participated in cultural dance performances, and was on the executive board for the pre-health honors society. Lavina enjoys travelling, working out, yoga, teaching at her church nursery, and dancing in her free time. While in Botswana, Lavina looks forward to building relationships, learning a new language, and making an impact on the students at Maru-a-Pula.