Alumni Directory Display

Alumni Update:

Rachel just started a two-year fellowship with the Global Development and Population Program at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation in Menlo Park, CA. She will be coordinating the foundation’s post-2015 work, as well as doing some grant-making in the foundation’s strategic areas. Before Rachel moved back to the Bay Area, she was in Addis Ababa working for the UN World Food Programme’s Africa Office on an African Union project called the Cost of Hunger in Africa (costofhungerafrica.com).

Fellow Bio:

Rachel (Stanford ‘10) graduated with a BA in International Relations and in 2011 earned an MA in African Studies. Rachel has worked for the Flora Family Foundation and for Fair Trade USA.  She also spent six months in Tanzania in 2008. While in Addis Ababa, Rachel looks forward to eating tons of Ethiopian food and traveling around the region.

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Laura Rabago graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) with a dual Bachelor of Arts in International Development Studies and Political Science with a concentration in International Affairs. As an undergraduate, Laura interned with the U.S. Agency of International Development (USAID) and an India-based non-profit, Ladli Foundation Trust. After volunteering in Southeast Asia in 2019, she co-founded a student association focused on promoting sustainable development, global awareness, and ethical volunteering. In recognition of her academic and extracurricular achievements, Laura was named the recipient of UCLA’s 2021 International Development Studies Activist Scholar Award. After undergrad, Laura joined Vital Voices Global Partnership, a non-profit that invests in women leaders taking on the world’s greatest challenges. She simultaneously supported the Los Angeles chapter of UN Women USA’s campaign focused on promoting the safety of women in public spaces. Prior to joining the Princeton in Africa 2024-25 Fellowship cohort, Laura provided communications and knowledge management support for USAID’s Act to End Neglected Tropical Diseases | East program, led by RTI International. Most notably in this role, she produced and disseminated key communications materials to highlight USAID’s investment and impact on NTD control and elimination, promoted the expansion of Act | East’s scientific stature as the program’s conference coordinator, and developed a training curriculum based on the World Health Organization’s “Microplanning manual to guide implementation of preventive chemotherapy to control and eliminate NTDs”. Laura is excited to join the CGIAR Climate Adaptation and Mitigation Impact Platform team and to be hosted by the International Livestock Research Institute in Nairobi! Following the fellowship, she plans to pursue her Master’s and build a career in international development and nonprofit communications. Born and raised in California, Laura enjoys traveling, volunteering, and baking.

Alumni Update:

Stephanie is a third-year Psychiatry resident at USC+LAC Medical Center. She hopes to be involved in global mental health upon graduation, ideally training psychiatrists in partnership with other universities.

Fellow Bio:

Stephanie (Middlebury ‘11) hails from London, England and is an International Studies major with a focus on Africa and History. At Middlebury, she worked as a hotline volunteer with WomenSafe, taught in local elementary schools, played rugby, and sang with the College Choir. During her spare time, Stephanie enjoys cooking foods from around the world with her friends. She spent the first semester of her junior year studying urban planning in India, South Africa and Argentina through the International Honors Program. During the second half of her junior year, she moved to Mali to study gender and community empowerment with SIT, where she did independent research on Mali’s industrialization. She is incredibly excited about seeing her Malian host family again, and looks forward to dancing to West African music and eating with her hands.

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. 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.

At the International Rescue Committee, Aishwarya worked on grants and communications, spearheading projects for dignified communication in refugee camps in Kenya.

Aishwarya serves as a Consultant and Climate Lead at Dubai Cares, and also works as a journalist based in Nairobi, Kenya. She has interned at Education Cannot Wait (ECW), a fund hosted by UNICEF that seeks to provide education in emergency and protracted-conflict zones, and 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. She has authored and co-authored various articles on migration, gender, and education.

She enjoys photography, dancing, playing the guitar, hiking, baking, writing prose, tango, and learning about people’s lives.

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.