Class of 2028
A.B. Duke Scholar
Hometown: Irving, Texas
Major: Program II: Interdisciplinary Lenses of Health: Systems, Inequity, and the Human Experience
Hobbies and Interests: Outside the classroom, Grace loves to create. From sewing projects to handwritten letters exchanged with pen pals, to whatever new idea has taken over her space. She spends her time designing from scratch, working on new projects, and having fun making her visions come to life.
Grace is drawn to projects that unfold slowly and imperfectly. Whether she’s piecing together fabric, starting something new, or climbing rocks in her free time, she gravitates toward work that requires patience, problem-solving, and imagination. Creating is how she makes sense of the world and reshapes it to feel more honest and humane.
Why Duke?
Grace chose Duke not just for what it offered, but for what it allowed her to build. Program II gave her the freedom to design an interdisciplinary path that mirrors her lived experience. At Duke, she found space to connect creation, care, and community, shaping an education that reflects both who she is and the kind of world she hopes to help imagine.
Grace’s academic interests are deeply rooted in her experiences in health spaces, particularly through her Program II curriculum and nursing assistant training. Working closely with patients taught her that health is never isolated, but shaped by education, culture, access, family dynamics, and belief systems. These experiences sharpened her awareness of how easily people fall through the cracks when care is reduced to symptoms rather than systems.
At Duke, Grace designed a major to examine how biological, socioeconomic, cultural, and political forces interact across the lifespan. Drawing from neuroscience, ethics, policy, and storytelling, her work explores how awareness and education can challenge stigma and inequity in healthcare. Her current research focuses on health belief systems in the rural South, using interviews and visual media to understand how people interpret illness when formal health literacy is limited or inaccessible.