Setu Mehta, AB 2021

The happiest moment…

in my premed career so far was starting BIOME and having the ability to create a program from scratch, to see it go from an idea in my head to a full-fledged program that continues to this day and has a legacy. It started as an idea when I was shadowing during winter break freshman year. I shadowed Dr. Cohen, a gastroenterologist at NYU Langone, in New York. We were talking about how there are so many talented students at Harvard, but not all of them can find shadowing experiences. There was nothing on campus that robustly allowed all interested students to shadow. So what if we had another program that catered to as many people as possible and created a community of resources to find shadowing opportunities? With the help of some friends my freshman summer, we were able to recruit organizations such as the OCS, the pre-med society, and the Harvard alumni in healthcare SIG to support us. It was such a huge milestone. We then pitched our program to hospitals, found partnerships, and funding so we could make this program as accessible as possible. It’s been amazing this past year to watch the new leadership take the program in new directions.

In high school…

I could not take a lot of ownership over my research. But in college, I joined an awesome lab where I was actually able to create my own cell line and see the process through from start to finish. My mentor gave me this idea that we could design a stem cell line that could make studying cell fate decisions during developmental biology easier. So I joined him on this journey and learned so much about what it means to be a biologist and scientist: to have a scientific intuition, to validate your results, to build genetic constructs and to validate your work. Of course, there were many times I had to troubleshoot when certain things didn’t work, but to see it now being finalized and continue to develop is just so cool.

As a volunteer for Access Health, I went to local soup kitchens and a local Korean Church to provide preventative health care screenings and general healthcare advice. There’s so much stigma surrounding homelessness, but as I met people who came to the kitchens, I came to realize that they have so many stories to tell. It was so special to provide them with important medical care such as taking their blood pressure. I was also a contact tracer for Partners in Health this past summer, and, again, getting to call people in MA and asking them how they were doing, to hear their stories, was so rewarding. I would also direct them to resources if they could not pay rent, had trouble finding food, and more. It was a life-changing experience.

Setu Mehta

AB 2021 | Human Developmental and Regenerative Biology

Compiled and interviewed by Felicia Ho