Riam Badr

Riam began her higher education at Miramar College, where she was awarded Associate degrees in biology, chemistry and mathematics. She earned straight A’s and the Silver Star Award while dealing with the challenges of remote learning during COVID-19. She also excels in languages, and was trilingual by sixth grade in Arabic, English and French. She has since studied Turkish and Spanish. Riam enjoys language learning for its own sake, but also believes that it allows her to “see a bigger world and improve my sense of belonging in a diverse and cosmopolitan environment such as UCSD.” Riam is enrolled in John Muir College.

She has worked in the past as a Program Aide at a local elementary school, and has had two paid internships with Pfizer. The first was as a Disability Colleague Resource Group Analyst, and the second was as a Student Lab Assistant working in oncology research. Riam has pursued a rigorous academic schedule while being a dedicated member of UC San Diego’s Women’s Rugby Club. She believes this has helped her develop teamwork skills, resilience, discipline, and sportsmanship.

She has also found time to participate in a number of other extracurricular endeavors, such as volunteering at multi-cultural food events, and serving as a tutor. She enjoyed her work as an undergraduate researcher at the Sanford Consortium for Regenerative Medicine, where she led an independent wet-lab cancer research project. Currently she is an intern at the School of Medicine and Jacobs School of Engineering doing work related to COVID-19 detection and testing. 

Riam has accomplished all of this as an immigrant who explains that she had to learn “the nuances of American culture, from social norms to educational expectations.” Even though she had studied English, initially dealing with the language in real life settings was not easy. However, she sought out activities to use the language, immersed herself in media and took extra language courses.

She hopes to do graduate work and become a medical device/biomedical engineer. She sees her future work as a meaningful way to give back to the community.