Biography

Sajia Darwish is a doctoral student in Biostatistics at Harvard University. She is co-advised by professors Bill Lotter and Rong Ma. Her research lies at the intersection of statistics and machine learning, with a focus on self-supervised representation learning for computational analysis of cancer histopathology.

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, Sajia enjoys dancing and creating digital content as an outlet to express herself beyond spoken language. She is also a certified yoga teacher.

Sajia actively mentors and advocates for young students in STEM. She is founder of libraries and resource centers for girls and women (which are unfortunately no longer open due to the Taliban rule) across her motherland, Afghanistan, and firmly believes in the power of education to transform individuals and societies.