Hannah Contreras

Hannah TM Contreras is a research scholar and pre-medical student from East Los Angeles, California. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Theoretical Mathematics from Wellesley College and MIT. Her interdisciplinary research spans translational medicine in pediatric congenital heart disease, machine learning for cardiac MRI and surgical simulation, nanotechnology for controlled-release vaccine delivery, and global health disparities. She has contributed to high-impact translational projects at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) Medical Vision Group, the Pediatric Surgical Research Laboratories at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, the Robert Langer Lab at MIT, and UCLA’s Department of Orthopaedic Surgery.

Ms. Contreras is a Master of Science by Research candidate in Surgical Sciences at the University of Oxford, affiliated with the Global Surgery Group in the Nuffield Department of Surgical Sciences. Under the supervision of Professor Kokila Lakhoo, her thesis investigates the global landscape of cardiac congenital anomaly registries. Her research aims to identify disparities in registry development, implementation, and data quality across countries with differing income levels, using a novel grading framework to evaluate their completeness, utility, and population coverage. Her work contributes to the broader goal of strengthening congenital anomaly surveillance and policy worldwide.