LaShyra Nolen, BS
LaShyra Nolen, BS
Student Body President
Harvard Medical School
LaShyra “Lash” Nolen is a Los Angeles native deeply passionate about the concerns of underserved and marginalized communities. She graduated with honors from Loyola Marymount University in 2017 with a B.S. in Health and Human Sciences. At LMU she served as the university’s elected student body President and spearheaded voter registration initiatives and advocated to create a pipeline for traditionally underrepresented students to enter student government. In addition to her work as president, Lash created a diabetes prevention program for women at Good Shepherd domestic violence shelter through a grant from the Clinton Global Initiative. Following her graduation Lash traveled to Spain as a Fulbright Scholar where she taught U.S. culture to Spanish youth and researched the perception and understanding of obesity and diabetes in La Coruña, Spain.
After her year in Spain, she then spent a year as an AmeriCorps health coach at the Heartland Innovation Center at Albany Park (ICAP) in Chicago, where she supported patients in improving their health via health education and motivational interviewing. During her time at Heartland, she spearheaded initiatives to increase clinic accessibility for uninsured patients and the improvement of the self-management goal-setting process across all Heartland Health Center locations.
Currently, she is a first-year student at Harvard Medical School where she is serving as the school’s student council president, the first documented black woman to hold this role. In her role Lash has led numerous initiatives for community advocacy within HMS and beyond. She is a published author and fervent advocate social justice who hopes to use her talents to pursue an MD/MPP dual-degree to then advocate for humane healthcare reform on both local and national scales.