Thea L. Enache

Romania and Silicon Valley have shaped the ground workings of how I see the world and what I care about. In Romania, I saw up close how inequity shapes health outcomes in a system that is understaffed and underfunded. In the Bay Area, I was exposed to how innovation could be a powerful force for good, but also how it can exacerbate inequities when it's not built with everyone in mind.

In Romania, I understood very early on that medicine was not neutral, that systems were not neutral, but rather that who you are, what you have, and particularly where you live, determines what you receive, often long before you're sick.

In California, the Bay Area taught me to always keep my ears perked in regards to what the tech field was up to. I grew up taking things apart with my father, and my fourth language was Python. I was convinced that innovation could solve all the mild inconveniences in my life. Slowly and then all at once, things got far more serious, and I saw who the big innovations were actually built for. Also, who they often failed to keep in mind. I continue to thoroughly enjoy developing targeted solutions to specific problems, but I have since gained significant context on the broader scale implications of certain broader scale initiatives. I have learned that innovation is not inherently good, and that it can be a powerful force for harm if it is not built with equity in mind.

I now exist in that grey zone, somewhere between those two places. I aim to utilize computational methods to build tools for public health, with equity always considered and always centered.

To hopefully provide me with the background I need to embark on this journey, I am completing dual degrees in Public Health and Mathematical Data Science + Computer Science at San Diego State University. I have been very fortunate to work at the intersection of public health and computational modeling in various regards early in my career. Thus far, that has been through epidemiological modeling, or developing clinical AI tools to address specific health access problems. I have also been very fortunate to work on projects that involve evaluating whether existing solutions are effectively reaching those they are designed for, which has been some of my favourite work thus far. I eventually want to work on problems like this across the globe.

Please feel free to pick around this page to follow along on my journey :)