Samir Panda and Priya Sharma
Samir Panda and Priya Sharma’s relationship was the mentorship that made everything else possible. Without Priya Sharma—an Indian-American professor at Harvard University working at the intersection of engineering and public health—Samir Panda might have survived Harvard, but he would not have thrived. And without thriving, there would have been no Haven.
How They Met
Priya Sharma noticed Samir Panda during his freshman year at Harvard, in the fall of 2019. What she saw was familiar: a quiet Indian student, brilliant and disoriented, navigating the specific culture shock of American elite academia with the intensity of someone who had been the smartest person in every room back home and was now recalibrating what that meant in rooms full of people who had been the same. She had been that student a generation earlier—an Indian-American woman who had fought for her place in engineering when the field barely acknowledged women, let alone women of color—and she recognized the signs. The careful observation before speaking. The social navigation that ran on learned rules rather than intuition. The hunger beneath the composure: not ambition in the American sense, but something older and heavier, the drive of someone whose family had invested everything in sending them across an ocean.
She reached out. Not with a dramatic intervention or a formal mentorship program, but with the same precision that would later characterize Samir’s own invitation to Logan Weston: she made herself available, consistently and without pressure. Office hours that turned into conversations. A question about his coursework that opened into a discussion about his father’s health. The recognition that this student needed not just academic guidance but someone who understood the specific weight of being an Indian international student in a country that read his body before his credentials.
The Mentorship
Professor Sharma’s mentorship included lessons no American-born professor could teach. She understood the accent comments—she’d weathered them herself, had learned when to let microaggressions slide and when to push back, and she shared that calculus with Samir. She understood the family obligation that stretched across an ocean—the phone calls, the guilt, the money sent home, the specific loneliness of holidays spent in a country that celebrated things you didn’t celebrate while the festivals that mattered happened without you. She understood the visa anxiety, the way immigration status turned every academic setback into an existential threat, the way “you could always go home” landed differently when home was ten thousand miles away and the family had bet everything on your not going back.
She directed Samir toward biomedical engineering. Pradeep was already ill during Samir’s Harvard years, and Priya understood how concern for his father sharpened his interest in technology and human need. She encouraged him to pursue that work at Johns Hopkins University. The recommendation letter she wrote for his Hopkins graduate school application was, by multiple accounts, one of the most compelling letters the admissions committee had read. Pradeep’s heart attack during Samir’s doctorate, followed months later by a stroke, later gave the research that became Project Haven its personal urgency.
Beyond the practical, Sharma taught Samir something about mentorship itself: that the best mentorship wasn’t about shaping someone in your image but about making space for them to become themselves. She held the door open without telling him which direction to walk through it. She offered her own experience as data, not prescription. When Samir later invited Logan to join Haven with the now-famous line—“the door is open and it stays open regardless of how far you walk through it”—the architecture of that invitation was Priya Sharma’s, rebuilt by Samir with his own materials.
Influence on Later Collaboration
Priya’s mentorship influenced how Samir welcomed Logan into Haven. She had made room for a quiet Odia freshman without prescribing what he had to become, and Samir carried that patience and respect for autonomy into his invitation to a young Black disabled medical student. Logan was his colleague and friend, not his mentee. The influence lay in how Samir offered access and valued another person’s knowledge, not in reproducing a teacher–student hierarchy. Logan recognized that Samir’s openness had a history in the room Priya had made for him at Harvard.
Their Relationship Over Time
Priya and Samir’s relationship evolved from mentor-student to something closer to colleagues and friends as Samir completed his doctorate and began his postdoctoral work. She followed Haven’s development with the invested interest of someone who had helped plant the seed. She was one of the first people outside the Hopkins team whom Samir told about Logan’s involvement, and her response—quiet pride, immediate understanding of why Logan’s contribution mattered—confirmed what Samir already knew: that she saw the work as he saw it, as something larger than engineering.
They stayed in contact across the years, their conversations shifting from academic guidance to professional dialogue to the kind of exchange that happens between two people who share a specific understanding of what it means to build a career in American science while carrying the weight of being from somewhere else. She remained a touchstone—the person whose approval still mattered, whose perspective still clarified, whose example still guided.