Biography

Sajia Darwish is a Ph.D. student in Biostatistics at Harvard University. Previously, she has worked as a graduate student researcher at the Center for Targeted Machine Learning and Causal Inference under the supervision of Alan Hubbard and as a special project researcher at the UC Berkeley D-Lab.

Sajia has a bachelor’s degree from Mount Holyoke College and master’s degrees from Stanford University and UC Berkeley.

Beyond academics, she enjoys nature and music. She is also actively mentoring and advocating for young students in STEM. Sajia is founder of libraries and resource centers for girls and women across Afghanistan. She firmly believes in the power of education to transform individuals and societies.

Research Experience

International Milk Composition Consortium (IMiC)

This research is an ongoing collaboration between the University of Manitoba and other university collaborators, including UC Berkeley. It aims to analyze milk from 1000 mother-infant dyads across four diverse settings (Tanzania, Pakistan, Burkina Faso and Canada). Sajia was a graduate student researcher on this project, working under the supervision of Alan Hubbard to process and analyze omics data from breastmilk samples and to analyze relationships between maternal milk composition and child growth and development.

Racism narratives in the medical literature

This research is an ongoing collaboration between the American Medical Association's Center for Health Equity and UC Berkeley's D-Lab. It seeks to use machine learning techniques, both supervised and unsupervised, to track racism-related narratives in the medical literature. Sajia was a graduate student researcher, working under the supervision of Chris Kennedy and performing unsupervised topic modeling such as the latent Dirichlet allocation technique to identify racism-related narratives in a select number of papers in the medical literature.

Figueroa, C. A., Manalo-Pedro, E., Pola, S., Darwish, S., Sachdeva, P., Guerrero, C., Von Vacano, C., Jha, M., De Maio, F., & Kennedy, C. J. (2023). The stories we tell about racism and health: the development of a framework for racism narratives in medical literature using computational grounded theory approach. International Journal for Equity in Health. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/s12939-023-02077-0

A new model for justice-involved people with mental illness

This research is an ongoing project at UC Berkeley's Risk Resilience Lab. It looks at the effect of a cognitive-behavioral treatment program designed to reduce offenders’ risk factors for recidivism (like attitudes that are supportive of crime) and develop social, emotional and coping skills. Sajia was a graduate student researcher, working under the supervision of Jennifer Skeem and performing advanced data wrangling techniques, tests, and analyses (e.g., survival analysis) on data from the randomized control trial.

College student experiences during the COVID-19 Pandemic

This research looks into experiences (e.g., responsibilities and mental health) of a national sample of college students throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Sajia is involved on various research projects under the supervision of Alison Cohen using this longitudinal survey data.

Armed conflict, student achievement, and access to higher education

This research was Sajia's master's thesis at Stanford University, under the supervision of Prashant Loyalka and Christine Min Wotipka. It examines the relationship between armed conflict and student achievement in Afghanistan using data from its national university entrance exam. Exploiting the province-year variation in exposure to conflict intensity, it estimates the relationship between conflict and exam results generally and by gender for all test takers from 2014–2019.

Darwish, S. & Wotipka, C. M. (2022). Armed conflict, student achievement, and access to higher education by gender in Afghanistan, 2014–2019. Globalisation, Societies and Education. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/14767724.2022.2115340