10/16/2026
👏 Congratulations to Shine from Mehdi Saligane's ReaLLMASIC Lab, recently selected a Voyager Scholar:
When Shine Gerkariah received news of his selection as a Voyager Scholar, his immediate instinct was to thank the friends who had encouraged him to apply.
“They made me feel like trying was something worth doing, even when I had no idea where it might lead,” he said.
That encouragement reflects what Gerkariah values most about his experience at Brown: the opportunity to explore his interests while helping others feel supported and included.
In Brown’s School of Engineering, he works in the ReALLMASIC Lab, where he uses signal processing to support bioinstrumentation design. He also serves as an introductory biology teaching assistant, a gender and sexuality peer counselor and president of the Program in Liberal Medical Education’s First Generation Underrepresented in Research in Medicine group.
“A lot of what I love about Brown ultimately comes back to people,” Gerkariah said. “I love building community, helping others feel like they belong and getting excited alongside other people about the things they care about.”
That interest in how people experience emerging technologies also shaped Gerkariah’s work as an AI governance and risk intern at VOCEL, a Chicago nonprofit serving K-12 students and families, where he researched AI policies in K–12 education.
As a Voyager Scholar, Gerkariah hopes to bring together his interests in healthcare, technology, research and policy to shape how AI is used in medicine.
“I want to help build systems that are powerful and innovative while also making people feel safe, respected and confident in the way those systems are being used,” he said.
