Maham Sewani

Maham began working with Plan International in 2021 as part of the Youth Advisory Board. Over the past four years she has spearheaded Plan’s Youth Leadership Academy, heading the workshop design subcommittee and serving as the 2021 coordinator. She has represented Plan at the White House Gender Policy Council and at the United Nations’ Commission on the Status of Women youth forum, advocating for online protections in the face of technology-facilitated gender-based violence. Her passion lies at the intersection of health care and social issues, and she hopes to work with Plan and other organizations to combat issues regarding women’s health and equitable health care access.

Maham graduates from Rice University where she received a Bachelor of Science degree in biosciences, with a cell biology and genetics concentration, and a Bachelor of Arts in social policy analysis on a pre-med track. At Rice, she was an emergency medical technician with Rice Emergency Medical Services and an executive board member for the university’s Planned Parenthood chapter. She was a research assistant at McGovern Medical School’s Wang Lab, studying the pathology of atrial fibrillation. Maham also has extensive experience in health equity research through Smith Research and Consulting and Stanford School of Medicine’s California Maternal Quality Care Collaborative.

Currently, Maham is spending her gap year before medical school leading maternal health research at Zayed University in Dubai as a Wagoner Foreign Study grant recipient.