#  Radhika Mathur (BBS) 

 





April 05, 2017

 

 

##  A Passion for Policy

 Every day between September and December 2016, Radhika Mathur, a PhD candidate in Biological and Biomedical Sciences (BBS), would stand outside the West Wing of the White House and take the same photo. “I wanted to soak everything in,” she explains. “I kept thinking ‘I cannot believe I’m here.’”

 Here was the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), where Mathur wrote and edited policy reports, attended interagency meetings and helped put together transition memos for the new administration. “As the Science Division intern, I worked with basically everyone in the division, which allowed me to participate in many different projects at OSTP.”

 While double majoring in economics and molecular & cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley, Mathur took two classes that set her on the path to both the lab of Dr. Charles Roberts (now at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee) and the White House. “I took a biology of human cancer course, and I quickly knew I could see myself investigating cancer biology during graduate school.” The second was a macroeconomics course taught by Dr. Christina Romer, the former chair of the Council of Economic Advisors in the Obama Administration. “That was the first moment where I thought ‘wow, I want to work for the president someday,’” Mathur remembers.

###  Mathur is a member of the Harvard Therapeutics Graduate Program, which aims to provide students with both academic and real-world experience in therapeutics discovery. Students are expected to complete a hands-on internship and most choose to spend those months in the pharmaceutical or biotech industry. Mathur, however, wanted something different. “I have always followed policy and politics closely,” Mathur explains. “Science policy felt like a great way to combine my interests in biomedical sciences and politics.”

 [READ MORE](https://gsas.harvard.edu/news/gsas-bulletin/april-2017/passion-policy)



 

 

 



 

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