Camille Aquino

Camille Aquino is from Bloomfield, New Jersey, and  graduating with a Sc.B. with Honors in Cognitive Neuroscience. She has focused on disability advocacy, serving low-income populations and managing public safety measures during her time at Brown.

Aquino volunteered as a voice actor to make children’s books more accessible to blind children with the club Fiction for Kids. She also served as a head American Sign Language (ASL) teaching assistant, president of Brown Sign Languages Society (BSLS), an ASL media translation assistant and a research assistant for Deaf Futures, a think tank team focusing on AI and sign languages interpreting as well as DeafYes!, a team working to improve Deaf accessibility in healthcare. Aquino also volunteered with Partnership for Adult Learning (PAL) as a tutor to adults with intellectual and learning disabilities. She successfully led the initiative to get PAL's Deaf students interpreting services for all social events after much pushback due to costs.

As president of BSLS, Aquino facilitated weekly ASL sessions for Brown students and alumni, community members and interpreters-in-training so people could practice conversing in ASL. She hosted and taught introductory ASL and Deaf culture workshops to spread awareness of the Deaf community and Deaf history for Brown students and community members. She also organized and managed events where Brown students and Deaf community members interact through activities like ASL Slam (a semesterly event of ASL performances and games). 

Aquino has supported low-income and underserved communities in her work as a scribe and medical assistant at the Rhode Island Free Clinic and as a Connect for Health (social work) advocate. 

She has also contributed to public safety management at Brown as a program coordinator and head supervisor of Safewalk. Safewalk is a student-run public safety nighttime escort service. Aquino led an initiative to get Safewalkers trained in hands-on CPR and opioid overdose prevention treatment (naloxone training). Her new policy and systemic changes increased the number of students escorted by three times compared to previous years and reduced cancellations due to student employees not showing up (which used to be an everyday occurrence) to zero. 

Akshay Amesur

Akshay Amesur is a senior from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, receiving an A.B. with Honors in IAPA on the Development track and a Certificate in Entrepreneurship. Amesur’s contributions to Brown have focused on enhancing student access to entrepreneurship and medicine and helping students build relevant skills.

Amesur co-founded the Brown Medical Entrepreneurship Society, a 150-member community for students to explore the intersections of medicine and business. He and his peers organized guest speakers, held international conferences and partnered with the New England Medical Innovation Center to connect Brown students with local healthcare startups.

Amesur has represented the Nelson Center to prospective students, advised curriculum changes and encouraged students from diverse concentrations to tackle global issues through entrepreneurship. As co-president of the Brown Healthcare Investment Group, he organized weekly education modules on finance and life sciences to make healthcare finance more accessible to students with no prior investment experience.

Amesur recently defended his IAPA honors thesis titled “Dose for Development: The Role of Academic Infrastructure and Political Economy in Pharmaceutical Innovation,” which assesses how academia, industry and governance produce divergent innovation outcomes in India and China. In this project, he leveraged communications and leadership skills that he learned as a Brown Daily Herald staff writer, a member of the Brown Consulting Club and Public Speaking Initiative, vice president of the club polo team and a Program in Liberal Medical Education (PLME) senator. For his research, Amesur received the Watson Institute’s Richard C. Barker Award for International and Public Affairs.

As a PLME student, Amesur will matriculate into The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University in August 2025 after completing a one-year M.Sc. in translational health sciences at the University of Oxford. He is excited to continue merging his interests in medicine and innovation and bring research breakthroughs from laboratory benches to patient beds.

Declan Boyle

Declan Boyle, originally born in Paris, spent most of his life in a small town outside of Philadelphia called Kennett Square. Boyle will be graduating from Brown in May with an Sc.B. in Electrical Engineering. In true Open Curriculum fashion, he has explored numerous disciplines, including chemical, mechanical and electrical engineering as well as entrepreneurship and sustainability. 

Starting in high school, he pursued his first initiative to help give voice to student-athletes by creating the Student Athletic Advisory Committee (SAAC) with a goal of creating a stronger relationship between the student body and the administration. As a football player, Boyle has had the opportunity to work with Brown football alumni to develop the Brown Football Alumni Network (BFAN) as a more effective way to create connections between current athletes and alumni, with the hope of expanding the network to all athletics. 

Following this incredible experience, Boyle was able to work closely with the football team’s Bear Faculty Liaison, Professor Sylvia Kuo, on the concept of learning transfer. Using the experiences developed through years of sport, they had hoped to find parallels in learning through athletics that would transfer into academics. Together, Kuo and Boyle started a pilot workshop focused on tangible skills to help develop holistic student-athlete identities, balancing their academic, athletic and personal lives.

Additionally, Boyle was a member of the Brown football team, receiving the Class of 1910 Football Trophy for highest academic achievement. He contributed to the Bench Press for Cancer and Be the Match initiatives; was a member of Brown Space Engineering, Scientists for a Sustainable World and SAAC; and was inaugurated into Brown’s Tau Beta Pi society. 

Boyle is so grateful for all the incredible relationships he has formed during his time at Brown. Engaging with students from a variety of backgrounds has enabled him to grow tremendously as a student, player and community member and has been one of the most instrumental parts of his time here.

Jennora Blair

Jennora Blair is a first-generation college student from New York City, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in modern culture and media and a bachelor’s degree in her independent concentration, Storytelling/Narrative Studies. Blair is a proud QuestBridge and Gates Scholar and a community elder at the Undocumented, First-Generation College and Low-Income (U-FLi) Center, her second home. She was a first-year scholar in the First-Generation Low-Income Scholar Program, a U-FLi peer counselor, and the Kessler Scholars program coordinator in her senior year, developing and facilitating the same community-building program that she reveled in as a first-year. Through her instrumental leadership, she has fueled the U-FLi community’s everpresent love and aura of liberation, building a home in the center for all students who arrive.

Blair was also a popular performer across campus. Known for the gentleness of her raspy tone, she was a beloved member, graphic designer and publicity director of Shades of Brown, the multicultural a cappella group rooted in the African American tradition. Additionally, she was a prominent rapper within the NotSoDifferent hip hop collective. You also may have seen her on stage in many bands, one notoriously named Bilk Bonic.

Given that she made her own concentration in Storytelling/Narrative Studies, she practically explored every academic department, from taking five Korean language courses to curating an entire exhibit with a RISD designer in the public humanities graduate program. Studying social justice and urban equity, she traveled the world, from Tougaloo College in Jackson, Mississippi, to universities in Indonesia. She built academic linkages across time and place to craft her own path of study, rooted in Black and Indigenous storytelling traditions. Blair examined art mediums as containers of stories, and how narratives empower, educate and heal communities. With gratitude, she considers herself to be composed of all of her communities, parents, professors and peers who have believed in her. Blair hopes to continue dreaming, creatively exploring and building communities forever, beyond Brown.

Alaina Cherry

Alaina Cherry is from Norwood, Massachusetts, and will be graduating with an A.B. in Cognitive Neuroscience and an A.B. with Honors in Visual Art. Her academic and artistic work focused both on exploring the nervous system and diving deeper into large-scale oil painting. She explores themes of gender, race and sexuality in her portrait painting. 

Cherry’s work involved mentorship and community building, with an emphasis on empathetic practices. Last year, she was in the first cohort of gender sexuality peer counselors (GSPCs), working at the LGBTQ Center and the Sarah Doyle Center for Women and Gender (SDC). This year, she served as a coordinator for the GSPC cohort, working closely with her co-coordinator Meleah Neely and Felicia Salinas-Moniz and Caitlin O’Neil, directors of the SDC and LGBTQ centers, respectively. She helped plan events, ensured productive programming and offered peer mentorship around topics of gender and sexuality. 

Cherry was also involved in the Meiklejohn Peer Advising Program, serving as both a Meiklejohn and a Meiklejohn leader since her sophomore year. Since starting these positions, she has mentored 18 first-years closely, worked to incite positive changes in the college and increased efforts to diversify the program. Lastly, she was the editor-in-chief for Brown’s XO Magazine, an arts and literary magazine about love, sex and sexuality. The magazine focuses on uplifting marginalized voices in both the Brown and RISD communities. 

After graduation, Cherry will move to London to earn her master’s in fine art at Goldsmiths School of London. She will work to bring her artistic perspective to a new city and work towards her long-term goal of being a professor in the arts.

Evani Dalal

Evani Dalal is from Trumbull, Connecticut, and receiving a Sc.B. in Computer Science, specializing in artificial intelligence/machine learning and data pathways. During her academic career, she has been committed to enriching the University community, emphasizing mentorship and inclusivity.

After transferring to Brown in her third year, Dalal served as a peer advisor in the transfer and RUE program, aiding a cohort of about 100 transfer students in adapting to Brown’s academic and social environment. Serving as a liaison between incoming students and program faculty, she hosted seminars on concentration selection and navigating student activities. She was also actively involved in the transfer club fair, connecting new students to opportunities at Brown.

Driven to build community through sport, Dalal co-founded a recreational club squash team for Brown and RISD students. She worked to ensure that squash was accessible to all students, regardless of prior experience, by coordinating with faculty to secure court times and equipment borrowing options.

Contributing to professional initiatives on campus, Dalal is a founding member of the University chapter of Girls Who Code, a nationwide organization supporting women in computer science. She launched new initiatives that help students prepare for job recruitment in technological fields and pair students with upperclassmen mentors. Through Girls Who Code, she aims to empower women in technology. Extending this to other fields, she has served as a teaching assistant in the economics department and was actively involved in the Intercollegiate Finance Journal’s first intercollegiate-focused team, connecting with other academic institutions to source journal submissions. She was also a presidential host, tackling a wide array of responsibilities in large campus events such as Commencement, Orientation and notable lectures.

After graduation, Dalal plans to work at the intersection of her passions in computer science and business, with a focus in artificial intelligence.

monique jonath

monique jonath is a senior from Oakland, California, receiving an A.B. in Psychology and an A.B. in Gender and Sexuality Studies with a focus on Black queerness and gender expression. jonath’s community work centered on the theme of peer education and support. In their first semester in Spring 2021, they joined the Sexual Health Awareness Group (SHAG), one of BWell Health Promotions’s five peer education programs, and by their second semester, they were one of the group’s three coordinators. jonath has served seven full semesters as a SHAG coordinator, developing dozens of sexual health-related workshops, training other peer educators, and helping facilitate, emcee and update the Culture of Consent Orientation program offered to all first-years. They also helped distribute countless free safer sex supplies and health empowerment tools during tabling events and answered many questions from peers through SHAG’s anonymous texting line. Throughout this work, monique deepened their passion for empowering others and increasing access to campus and community resources. 

jonath also continued their sex education work beyond College Hill, spending five semesters as a facilitator with Sexual Health Advocacy through Peer Education, a program affiliated with the Swearer Center and Planned Parenthood of Southern New England. Their academic work was also strongly informed by and integrated into their hands-on experience, and they wrote long-form qualitative research papers on sexual scripts and hookup culture from a solutions-oriented perspective, drawing on interviews with other students. 

As for peer support work, jonath spent two years as a minority peer counselor with the BCSC. In this role they designed and presented workshops around cisheterosexism as part of the Third World Transition Program, supporting BCSC operations, many check-ins and home-cooked dinners with mentees, and, in the second year, providing guidance to new peer counselors. And of course, with three years on Oja! Modern African Dance Team under their belt, jonath brought dance to every BCSC event they participated in.

Sander Moffitt

Sander Moffitt, from Eugene, Oregon, will receive an A.B. in Biology and an A.B. in English. Her academic interests center around science communication, specifically in the fields of ecology, conservation and sexual health. You’ve probably seen her engrossed by an 1820s plant in the BioMed Center’s herbarium or heard her shouting “Free condoms! So free!” on the Main Green. After graduation, Moffitt will be working with the National Parks, creating science education and communication materials for the National Natural Landmarks Program.

As SHAG coordinator, Moffitt has facilitated dozens of sexual health workshops with topics ranging from consent and communication to accessibility in intimacy. She has a love for tabling and connecting directly with her community and has distributed thousands of safer sex supplies and hundreds of boxes of emergency contraception. Moffitt is also an undergraduate coordinator for the Disability Justice Student Initiative (DJSI), for which she designs events to bring disabled and neurodivergent students together. Her favorite project was a two-part series focused on sex and disability that she created and facilitated in collaboration with SHAG, DJSI, the LGBTQ Center and local adult shop Mister Sister. 

Moffitt worked as a digitizer at the Brown Herbarium, helping to make Brown’s dried plant collections of over 100,000 specimens available to researchers worldwide. She organized open houses to educate students on botany and preservation. Moffitt also conducted conservation research at the Missouri Botanical Garden, assessing their rare plant collections and teaching everyone from biologists to 5-year-olds about endangered species. Most recently, Moffitt has been interning at Providence’s Roger Williams Park Natural History Museum, single-handedly organizing their coral collections and creating an educational exhibit on coral ecology and conservation.

Moffitt’s time at Brown has brought her so much joy, and she is so grateful to have been able to do this work with and for her community.

Roshan Parikh

Roshan Parikh is a senior from Memphis, Tennessee, and he is receiving an Sc.B. with Honors in Applied Mathematics-Biology.  He transferred from New York University in 2021 and has since been immersed in student life at Brown. His involvement has centered around building community at Brown and focusing on educational initiatives. 

In the South Asian Students Association, Parikh has held many positions, most recently as president. He focused on rebuilding the South Asian Coalition, a collection of South Asian student groups that represent distinct countries and identities so that the groups could pool resources and ideas to build a stronger South Asian community. Under his leadership, the club re-emphasized its educational mission with new events geared toward modern discussions in the South Asian community. In the same vein, he also took the largest group from Brown ever to the South Asian Youth Initiative conference at Yale, the country’s largest South Asian collegiate conference. 

He also served as the TRUE peer advisor coordinator, helping over 150 fellow transfer, RUE students and students ease their transition into Brown. This past year, he piloted a webinar program for incoming students that covered topics such as pre-professional coursework, popular concentration pathways, and transferring credits. 

Parikh has also been involved heavily in the language community at Brown and in Providence. He has served as a language table facilitator for Hindi, Urdu and Gujarati languages, and he also won the World Languages and Cultures Undergraduate Award at Brown for work in Persian language coursework. Building on his experience as an English teacher in his hometown, he has worked as a volunteer English teacher at the Refugee Dream Center in Providence, teaching Afghan refugees using his Persian language knowledge. 

After graduating from Brown, Parikh plans to attend medical school. He hopes to have a career where he can combine his analytical background with his passion for languages to improve patient care.

Talia Sawiris

Talia Sawiris is an Egyptian student from London, U.K., who will be graduating with an A.B. in English. Throughout her time at Brown, Sawiris demonstrated a strong commitment to leadership, inclusivity and mentorship, making significant contributions to the University community. 

Sawiris was deeply engaged in Arab life on campus. As the elected co-president of the Arab Society for two years, she built inclusive spaces for her community to gather, advocated for the rights and protection of Arab and Muslim students amidst the current U.S. college climate and supported the divestment movement at Brown. Additionally, she helped establish an alumni network to connect and empower Arab students. 

Sawiris’s community-building efforts extended further, serving as the diversity, equity and inclusion chair for the Brown Union of Global Students, fostering a supportive community for international students. In this role, she helped create policies to make recruitment more diverse, facilitated community dialogue, especially around accountability, and developed community values.

Sawiris also served a term on the Undergraduate Council of Students Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee. Additionally, she facilitated workshops on gender-based violence as a sexual assault peer educator.