Asma Mardini ’22

She spent the past year as a research assistant at MIT under the supervision of Professor Ernst Berndt. She, alongside her team (Annabelle Fowler, PhD and Ben Wolfert, MBA), will be presenting their work on the economics of the pharmaceutical industry at the 2022 AshEcon Conference in health economics in Austin, Texas. The summer of 2021, Asma was selected as a Karl E. Case Fellow, where she assisted Professors Olga Shurchkov and Kartini Shastry in development economics projects. Outside the classroom, Asma has served as the President of the Wellesley Arab Women’s Association, the Middle Eastern Representative of Wellesley’s International Student Association, and as a co-organizer of the annual MIT Arab Conference on science and technology. She is also a winner of the MIT Lebanon Challenge, where her team presented business solutions to the water scarcity crisis in her native country Lebanon. She grew up in Saudi Arabia and speaks Arabic and Spanish. Upon graduation, she hopes to work as a data analyst before attending graduate school, where she aspires to conduct research at the intersection of computer science, economics, and policy.