Swara Patel is an MD candidate at Harvard Medical School. She was a Macaulay Honors College at CUNY Hunter College where she double majored in Biological Sciences and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality studies. As an undergraduate student, Swara was selected as a Harvard Amgen Scholar. This experience sparked deep engagement in optimizing cell therapies against solid tumors at institutions including Harvard Medical School and the lab of CAR-T cell therapy pioneer, Dr. Carl June, at the University of Pennsylvania. Swara was awarded the Barry Goldwater scholarship and conducted research full-time at the Karuna Ganesh and David Scheinberg labs at Memorial Sloan Kettering working on the development of a first in-class TCR-T cell therapy targeting metastatic colorectal cancer. 

Her early experiences with the menstrual taboo and interactions with women who struggled to access period products motivated her to begin, The Period Society, a non-profit which works pan-India to conduct menstrual health education sessions impacting 50,000+ people and distributing over a million period products at the age of 16. The Period Society's impact has been recognized internationally through The Diana Award, a gender equality roundtable hosted by Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, and Swara's keynote ambassador speech at the One Young World 2022 summit. 

Swara was raised in Mumbai, India till the age of 16. Growing up in a multigenerational household, Swara was deeply influenced by her grandfather, a former freedom fighter in India’s struggle for independence from British colonial rule. Swara aspires to become a surgeon-scientist leading the clinical translation of immunotherapies while continuing her global health work to create patient education programs to facilitate earlier detection of disease and empower patients in resource constrained settings with agency over their health. 

Swara is a trained Bharatanatyam dancer and enjoys reading and trying new bubble tea places in her free time.