Prakriti Gaba, a member of our 30 Under 30 Healthcare list, is a frontline healthcare worker during the Covid-19 crisis.was an internal medicine resident working at New York Presbyterian Hospital in March when the first cases of Covid-19 started coming in. Gaba, age 28, who was in the hospital’s intensive care unit, saw firsthand the devastation of the early months of the pandemic. “It was kind of just such a surreal experience, but also a nightmare at the same time,” she says.
But Gaba, now doing a cardiology fellowship at Harvard, wasn’t just working on the frontlines of the pandemic; she was also researching. Her research focuses on the speed and efficiency of clinical trials, which are essential for developing new treatments and vaccines against Covid-19. She wants to understand “how we can use this pandemic to more quickly generate research,” for this current crisis and for future ones.
Gaba is just one of the Covid-19 champions on our Under 30 lists this year. From volunteering their personal time, to tackling additional research projects, to having to nimbly adapt their businesses to the ongoing pandemic, these inspiring entrepreneurs, researchers and academics are showing that they can still get incredible things done during a global crisis.
Max Jordan Nguemeni Tiako, a medical student at the Yale School of Medicine, coauthored a paper that described how racial and ethnic disparities can lead people in communities of color to experience higher rates of post-intensive care syndrome after hospitalization with Covid-19.Like Gaba, there are several other Under 30 listmakers this year who have been researching various aspects of Covid-19.
Yiran Yang, a PhD candidate at the California Institute of Technology, coauthored a study about a potential new at-home test for Covid-19 made from laser-engraved graphene.