Suja Thomas came to the US from Kuwait by way of India to pursue her graduate degree in mathematics. Born in Kuwait in 1988 to Indian parents, she grew up immersed in both Middle Eastern and Indian culture. She learned to speak Arabic, English, Hindi, and Malayalam, a regional language from a South Indian state. When the Gulf War broke out, her family took shelter in their house. After two days, an Indian consul aided their passage to an airport to escape the country. They were nearly detained multiple times, but managed to reach the airport unmolested. The evacuation plane took only women and children, but her father was allowed on the plane to help her mother, who had surgery just before the start of the war. The plane flew to an airport in Afghanistan, where the Indian passengers on the plane had to stay overnight while the Indian foreign minister negotiated with the Afghanistan government to allow the passengers to take a plane to Mumbai. The family moved to Chennai to be with relatives, which was her first time living in India. She completed her secondary education there, and moved to Delhi to get her undergraduate degree in mathematics. Afterwards, she became interested in moving to the US to pursue a graduate degree. A friend of hers living in the US convinced her to come, and she began her advanced studies in mathematics, but quickly realized that this wasn’t the right path for her and transferred to taking biomedical engineering at UNC chapel hill. She remained in the US after graduating, and currently works at a local startup as a data scientist.

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