MIT senior Srihitha Dasari never imagined she would be speaking in front of the United Nations about health care, technology, and the power of co-designing public health interventions in collaboration with impacted communities.
But when she stepped up to the podium to speak about digital well-being and community-centered health care design, she carried with her more than research findings. She brought several years of experiential learning in public health environments, ranging from visiting exam rooms of New England’s largest safety net hospital to collaborating with nurses in rural Argentina and working on maternal health in India and Nepal.
Dasari arrived at MIT intending to major in brain and cognitive sciences and follow a pre-med track. Like many aspiring physicians, she pictured her MIT years filled with lab work, shadowing doctors, and preparing for medical school. Instead, during her first Independent Activities Period (IAP), she enrolled in the PKG Center for Social Impact’s IAP Health Program and began to broaden her understanding of practicing medicine.
“What was really incredible about IAP Health,” says Dasari, is that “I did it so early in not only my academic career, but just in the beginning of when I was actually formulating a lot of my career aspirations, [and] it really immersed me into what public health looks like.”
Through IAP Health, Dasari worked as an intern at the Boston Medical Center Autism Program. There, she provided in-clinic support to children with autism and their families, helping guide them through appointments and collaborating with physicians to adapt exam techniques to meet patients’ needs.
“When you think about how medicine is delivered, it can feel very systematic — like there are boxes you have to check,” she says. “But working in that clinic showed me … you can modify the experience to truly care for the whole person.”
The program exposed her not only to clinical care, but to the broader forces that shape health outcomes. “I didn’t envision myself doing public health when I entered college,” Dasari says. “But looking back, public health is the through line of everything I’ve done.”
She remained at Boston Medical Center as an intern for over a year with continued support and funding from the PKG Center’s Federal Work-Study and Social Impact Internship programs. The sustained engagement deepened her understanding of how health-care systems can either reinforce or reduce disparities — a systems-level perspective that carried into her global work.
During her second-year IAP, Dasari received a PKG Fellowship to develop an electronic health record system for a maternal ward in a rural hospital in Argentina. The project grew out of a relationship she developed through the student group MIT Global Health Alliance, which supports co-designing public health interventions with impacted communities.
Dasari’s collaboration with the hospital evolved into a social enterprise that she co-founded: PuntoSalud, an AI-powered chatbot designed to bridge health information gaps in rural Argentina. Dasari and her co-founders received a $5,000 award and seed funding to prototype and develop PuntoSalud through the PKG IDEAS Social Innovation Incubator, MIT’s only entrepreneurship program focused solely on social impact.
Speaking at the United Nations underscored a lesson she absorbed throughout her varied experience: Meaningful health innovation begins with relationships.
“I’ve been able to meet people from so many different facets of the health-care pipeline that I didn’t envision myself meeting,” Dasari says.
The mindset she developed through PKG programming has informed her experience beyond the center. Through MIT D-Lab, Dasari conducted maternal and neonatal health needs assessments in rural Nepal, interviewing community members to better understand gaps in care. The findings informed efforts to retrofit birthing centers with improved heating systems in cold climates. Later, supported by the MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives, she traveled to India to interview health-care providers about strategies to reduce non-medical cesarean section rates, with the goal of developing policy recommendations for other health systems.
“I came in thinking I would practice medicine one-on-one,” Dasari says. “Now I want to increase my impact in the health care field. I see that as clinical medicine intersected with public health, relieving health disparities for a wider population.”
As Dasari prepares to leave MIT for a year in clinical research, she does so with a systems lens on science and health care, and a commitment to social impact.
“The path I’ve taken in health care as an undergrad student has given me both a sense of purpose and fulfillment as I prepare to leave MIT,” she says. “It’s shown me that meaningful impact can begin long before medical school, and that I want to carry forward the values these experiences instilled in me.”
For Dasari, experiential learning didn’t redirect her ambitions, but enhanced them.
“I feel like the PKG Center … it’s not changing your goals,” she says. “It’s shaping them into their fullest potential.”
