Hari Bhimaraju

Hari Bhimaraju is from Cupertino, CA and graduated from The Harker School in San Jose, CA. She is excited by the potential of healthcare technology in furthering personalized and accessible medical care for all. At Columbia, she hopes to explore her interests in biomedical engineering, innovation and social entrepreneurship, design, and technology.

Hari enjoys combining her love for technology and community service through her various endeavors. As the Co-President of nonprofit Donum Visi, she has created accessible tools for the visually impaired that have been distributed at blind schools around the world. She has directed educational programs in introductory programming, electronics, entrepreneurship, and public speaking for both sighted and visually impaired students globally. Through these endeavors, she has raised funds for around 300 cataract surgeries and made capital donations to Sankara Eye Foundation hospitals. Her explorations gave her the honor of presenting at the White House Science Fair, where she met President Obama. She was also featured in the ABC News Young & Gifted series and the CBS News Women’s History Month PSAs.

Hari has been a student researcher in the Institute for Future Health at UC Irvine with Professor Ramesh Jain since 2017. At UCI, she worked to develop technologies that can improve the personalization and predictive capabilities of healthcare, primarily in terms of environmental exposure. She co-authored a paper, “Cross-Modal Health State Estimation,” that was presented at the 2018 ACM Multimedia Conference and first-authored two papers. The first, titled, “Low-Cost Enhancement of Facial Mask Filtration to Prevent Transmission of COVID-19,” was published in the Biometrics & Biostatistics International Journal in 2020. The second, titled “Atmosome: The Personal Atmospheric Exposome,” was published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research in 2021. To gain exposure to laboratory work and better understand healthcare from the medical side, Hari conducted research at the Blau Lab in the Stanford Medical School in 2019. At Stanford, she developed a computational algorithm to help identify transcription factors on satellite stem cells associated with Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy.

In high school, Hari was the Operations President of the FRC robotics team and a performer in choral groups and Indian cultural dance organizations. She loves to enjoy and create art in all forms, explore the outdoors, shamelessly embrace her “café-aholic” lifestyle, and spend time with her friends and family.