Sonya Soni, MPH

Sonya is currently a Senior Program Associate with Global Health Strategies in New Delhi, India. She supports its equitable access to childhood vaccination project under the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and John Hopkins School of Public Health.

Sonya’s focus areas include global health ethics, girls' health, poverty, and child rights, particularly having worked to address the disproportionate burden of India's child malnutrition epidemic on girls. She has worked between the U.S. and South Asia for NGOs including Nyaya Health, Physicians for Human Rights, and the Comprehensive Rural Health Project Jamkhed. She also served as a research assistant under Nobel laureate Amartya Sen at the Harvard Francois-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health & Human Rights. Sonya was selected as a 2012-13 Global Health Corps fellow and was placed at the Office of Mayor Cory Booker in Newark, NJ.

Sonya completed her B.S. in Health Promotion & Disease Prevention in 2007 and a Master’s of Public Health in 2009 from the University of Southern California's Keck School of Medicine, where she was selected as an Albert Schweitzer fellow. She pursued a second master’s degree in medical anthropology at Harvard University, where she served as a teaching fellow for global health expert Dr. Paul Farmer. In addition, she was selected as a Cultural Bridge fellow for the Harvard Kennedy School of Government's Women & Public Policy Program in rural Nepal, and a Harvard Humanitarian Initiative fellow in Kashmir.

Sonya aspires to become 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.