About Niharika Shukla
Niharika Shukla is a high school student from Pennsylvania who is passionate about tackling the mental health crisis for youth with activism, research and policy.
Leading a youth activism group, Niharika co-wrote Pennsylvania Senate Bill 886 and House Bill 1519 (reintroduced as Senate Bill 781 and House Bill 1648) alongside Senator Kane, Senator Schwank, and Representative Nelson to establish excused mental health days off for over 1.7 million students in Pennsylvania. Niharika co-wrote and led the passage of the statewide Teen Mental Health Awareness Day Proclamation, signed by Gov. Josh Shapiro, and was the sole author of the corresponding Cumberland County Proclamation, for the past two years.
She serves as an elected Junior Commissioner to the Hampden Township Board of Commissioners, and has worked with the Pennsylvania House of Representatives as a legislative intern, along with serving Cumberland County and the Commissioners' Office as a policy intern under the Chief Clerk. Niharika advises Governor Shapiro's administration as a NextGen Youth Advisor on the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, and is a Youth Advisory Council member on the PA Department of Health.
As a research assistant at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital's clinical psychiatry lab, Niharika is conducting NIH-funded youth suicide research. Her work has been awarded the Neil S. Jacobs Child Maltreatment & Interpersonal Violence SIG Student Poster Award at the 59th Annual ABCT Convention, recognizing the top poster addressing research with underrepresented populations and advancing equity in the field.
Niharika was also selected as 1 of 11 Harris Interns at Stanford School of Medicine, working at a neuroscience lab within the Department of Neurosurgery, studying traumatic brain injury at the Palo Alto VA. She was appointed to Lady Gaga's Born This Way Foundation Youth Advisory Board as 1 of 35 internationally, and has previously conducted research on anxiety disorders at Columbia Psychiatry.
Her research and activism have been recognized on ABC News, the NASDAQ billboard in Times Square, and in the Pennsylvania State Capitol, and has been awarded the President H.W. Bush Daily Point of Light Award, the NCWIT Aspirations in Computing National Award, and the Princeton Prize in Race Relations National Award.
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