Author: Sonya Soni

Sonya’s family is from Punjab, India, and she shares her time between India and the United States. Sonya’s passion for global health equity lies in the intersection between child health and child rights for India’s orphans and street children. She completed her B.S. in Health Promotion & Disease Prevention in 2007 and Master’s of Public Health in 2009 from the University of Southern California's Keck School of Medicine, where she was also selected as an Albert Schweitzer Fellow. Sonya pursued further graduate studies in medical anthropology at Harvard University, where she served as a teaching fellow for Dr. Paul Farmer, a Cultural Bridge fellow for the Harvard Kennedy School of Government’s Women & Public Policy Program in rural Nepal, a Harvard Humanitarian Initiative fellow in Kashmir, and a research assistant for Professor Amartya Sen at Harvard’s Francois-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health & Human Rights. Sonya then served as a 2012-13 Global Health Corps health policy fellow for the Office of Mayor Cory Booker in Newark, NJ. Sonya aspires to return to her ancestral home of India as a medical anthropologist and human rights journalist in order to address inequalities in girls’ health in India, and to continue to co-direct the Saraswati Soni Mahila Ashram, her family’s all-female orphanage and widow home in Dehra Dun, India.