Speaker's Profile

I am a seventeen-year-old researcher, advocate, and founder. Most importantly, I am someone who has experienced the gaps in our behavioral health system firsthand. My eating disorder began when I was eleven. What started as wanting to be “healthier” quickly became an obsession with calories and my body. Eventually, I was hospitalized before beginning a recovery that would take more than five years. That experience is the foundation of everything I do. Today, I am a research assistant at the Eating Anxiety Treatment Laboratory at the University of Louisville and the Advancing Representation and Inclusion in the Study of Eating Lab at Michigan State University. In these roles, I focus on representation and access to treatment in eating disorder research. Recently, I presented my original research titled “Seasonal Patterns in Public Mental Health Discourse on Twitter in the United States, 2012-2021” at the L.A. County Science Fair and won an Honorable Mention. In this work, I analyzed patterns in over twenty keywords including “depressed”, “anxiety”, and “burnout”. I am a youth advocate at STRIPED at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where I contribute to the Out of Kids' Hands campaign and recently submitted testimony to the California Legislature in support of AB 2030, a bill to ban the sale of over-the-counter diet pills to minors.Furthermore, I serve on the Youth Advisory Board at Plan International, where I collaborate with fellow young leaders to build the Youth Leadership Academy and provide input on policies, ensuring youth perspectives shape organizational decisions.I founded Project Unlaced (projectunlaced.org), a youth-led movement empowering young women to push back against the cultural, technological, and institutional systems that shape how they see themselves. We especially focus on the growing role of social media and AI in mental health. As part of Project Unlaced, I host a podcast featuring medical professionals and people with lived experience, and I have delivered a clinician-collaborated workshop on eating disorders in sports to over 300 students.I also co-founded Buya Teams (buyateams.com), a nonprofit building a platform for young women to have brave, honest, and imperfect conversations. We have completed a successful alpha test with twenty participants and are now building a web-based platform to expand our reach. I plan to pursue a PhD in clinical psychology so that my research is always grounded in lived experience. I don’t just study these issues; I have lived them.