Our Team

Sairandri Sathyanarayanan

Founder

Hi! I am a first year medical student at the UT Houston McGovern Medical School. In the three years since founding MHEA, I have better understood the problem of healthcare inequality. I believe that healthcare should be a fundamental right, and not a privilege. To this end, I am committed to educating myself and thinking of innovative ways to close gaps in access to healthcare in our society.

Brooke Thimmig

Director of Content Development

Brooke graduated from the University of Washington (UW) as a pre-med student with a Bachelor of Arts in Dance and departmental honors. Before applying to medical school, Brooke is taking a gap year to work as a Patient Care Technician in a Level I Trauma Emergency Department in Dallas, Texas. Brooke's passion for helping others led her to join MHEA in 2018. As a healthcare provider and dancer, Brooke brings her compassion and creativity to the MHEA team.

Aniruddh Saxena

Director of Strategy and Operations

Hi! My name is Aniruddh and I am currently a research associate at Sana Biotechnology. I am a recent UW Bioengineering grad and have been a part of MHEA since my freshman year of college. I became a part of MHEA because I felt that often students are not adequately equipped to help themselves or a friend when it comes to mental health issues and the stigma around mental health makes it worse. I want to do something about this and destigmatize mental health.

Ed van Bruggen

Lead Web Developer

Ed is a physics PhD student at the University of Massachusetts. He is currently conducting research on neutrinoless double beta decay at nEXO. Previously he worked on simulating a new Dark Higgs model which would allow for dark matter production at the Large Hadron Collider. In his free time he does photography and works on various programming projects.

Serah Prakkat

Director of Outreach and Media

Serah Prakkat is currently a senior with an avid interest in human behavior and technology and intends to double major in Psychology and HCDE. In addition to MHEA, she is a part of another non-profit organization at UW named 'Kinspire' which aims to help educationally aspiring orphans in India receive the knowledge they deserve. She is also an ardent dog lover and has even started an Instagram account dedicated to her dog, Charlie.