Vaidehi Persad is a second-year student at the University of South Florida, double majoring in Chemistry and Economics while double minoring in Public Health and Women & Gender Studies. She serves as a Senior Justice on her student government judicial branch and interns with Equality Florida's Safe and Healthy Schools Project. Vaidehi is a co-facilitator of the Tampa Bay chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, and actively demands equitable change through campus organizing, state-wide mobilizations, and national days of action. She is passionate about tackling local public health inequities, especially those particular to the rural Deep South, through bottom-up action and collective initiatives. Vaidehi is recognized as a 2021 CDC Undergraduate Public Health Scholar and a 2021 alumni of the Harvard Kennedy School Public Policy Leadership Conference. She will spend this summer at UC Berkeley Goldman School for the 2022 Public Policy & International Affairs Program. After graduating, Vaidehi plans to pursue a dual Master's of Public Policy and Master's of Public Health in anticipation of informing data-driven policy. In her free-time, Vaidehi enjoys the art of printmaking, sustainable gardening, and reading postcolonial literature. Vaidehi is originally from Sebring, Florida.