Sara Berzingi

Sara Berzingi, from Morgantown, will graduate with degrees in biology and English with a concentration in professional writing and editing. She is a two-term president of the Muslim Student Association, has served as the diversity executive for the Student Government Association, and a former student ambassador for the Division of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. 

She also serves as a youth leader for the Muslim Youth of Morgantown, a commissioner for the Martin Luther King Jr. Statewide Holiday Commission, and writes poetry for The Bench, a local artists’ collective committed to fostering a sense of community in Morgantown.

Berzingi has spent her last four summers volunteering with aid organizations abroad, working to manage the Internally Displaced Persons crisis emerging from the siege of Mosul, volunteering in a labor and delivery ward in Erbil, Iraq, and teaching English to children in an Iraqi refugee camp.

Berzingi’s academic trajectory was transformed through international experiences that inspired her to pursue a career in global health.

In 2015, she performed undergraduate research and served as a team lead in the Auditory Development and Connectomics Laboratory. Through her research, she completed an honors thesis investigating the role of astrocytes in MNTB principle cell development. From 2016–17, she served as a co-investigator in a clinical research study measuring the reliability of the Standards for Clinician Interview in Psychiatry (SCIP) survey tool in assessment of patients in the Chestnut Ridge Center. 

Berzingi has spent her college career advocating for the elevation of minority student voices on campus and in the state. She has collaborated with the Reed College of Media on Muslim in Appalachia, a 360° video series, and was selected as a speaker for the inaugural TEDxWVU event, where she shared how to build bridges between people using simple interactions. 

She is the recipient the WVU Eberly Scholarship, the Captain William S. Neely English Award, and has been endorsed by WVU for the Rhodes Scholarship. 

Berzingi will attend the West Virginia University School of Medicine in the fall and intends to apply for the Global Health Track.