Our Team
FOUNDER & EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR: Zaina A. Chaudhry
Zaina A. Chaudhry is the founder of Luminize, a platform born from her belief in the power of personal stories to illuminate the parts of healthcare that data alone cannot capture. With a background spanning medicine, healthcare administration, and health policy, Zaina has long been interested in not only how healthcare is delivered, but how the systems surrounding patients shape their ability to heal.
During her medical training, that interest became increasingly personal. In clinics and hospitals, she encountered patients whose diagnoses told only a fraction of their stories. Behind their symptoms were experiences with housing instability, financial hardship, cultural barriers, social isolation, health literacy, and other circumstances that could profoundly influence their health yet remain largely invisible in a traditional medical history. These encounters taught her that understanding illness often requires looking beyond what can be measured in a laboratory or captured in a medical chart.
She founded Luminize to create a space for those stories and the larger conversations they reveal. Through narrative storytelling, education, and community engagement, Luminize explores the human experiences and systemic forces that shape health while encouraging healthcare professionals and future physicians to approach patients with greater curiosity, empathy, and awareness.
For Zaina, storytelling is more than reflection. It can be a catalyst for recognition, conversation, and ultimately, change. Through Luminize, she hopes to bring overlooked experiences into view, challenge others to think critically about the systems in which care is delivered, and build a community committed to making healthcare more human, equitable, and responsive to the people it serves.
Director of Health Equity & Community Engagement: Cyanna Padmore
Cyanna Padmore is a fourth-year medical student at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School with a passion for advancing health equity and exploring the intersections of medicine, public health, and community engagement. Her academic and clinical interests include women’s health, primary care, global health, and the social and structural factors that shape health outcomes.
Throughout her medical training, Cyanna has become particularly interested in how a patient’s environment, culture, access to resources, and lived experiences influence their health in ways that may not always be visible in the clinical setting. She strives to approach patient care with cultural humility, curiosity, and an understanding that meaningful care begins with listening to the person behind the diagnosis.
At Luminize, Cyanna brings this perspective to initiatives centered on health equity, community engagement, and patient advocacy. She is passionate about creating conversations that make complex healthcare issues more accessible while drawing attention to the voices and experiences that are too often overlooked within medicine.
In the future, Cyanna hopes to become a physician who not only provides excellent clinical care, but also empowers patients through education, empathy, and advocacy. She believes that a more equitable healthcare system begins with understanding the communities it serves and ensuring that every patient feels seen, heard, and equipped to participate in their own care.
Director of Narrative & Creative Strategy: Malaika JAWED
Malaika Jawed brings together a unique background in narrative medicine, creative writing, healthcare, and strategy. She recently completed the Narrative Medicine program at Columbia University and earned her Master’s in Creative Writing from University College Cork in Ireland. She currently works as an Associate Consultant at Wildfire Strategies, where she continues to explore the role of communication and storytelling in shaping how people understand complex ideas and experiences.
Her perspective on healthcare has also been shaped by more than six years of experience as an emergency medical technician. Working closely with patients during some of their most vulnerable moments gave Malaika an intimate understanding of how much exists beyond a diagnosis. These experiences sparked a deeper interest in the stories patients carry, the emotional realities of providing care, and the ways healthcare systems can better recognize the humanity of both patients and the people caring for them.
Through her work in narrative medicine and creative writing, Malaika explores storytelling as a tool for reflection, connection, and change. She is particularly interested in bridging the humanities and medicine to create space for experiences that can be difficult to capture through traditional clinical language alone.
At Luminize, Malaika brings this interdisciplinary perspective to the platform’s storytelling and creative direction, helping transform lived experiences into narratives that invite readers to see healthcare differently. She is passionate about building a more patient-centered healthcare system while also advocating for the well-being of healthcare professionals, recognizing that a more compassionate system must care for both those receiving care and those providing it.
Her work reflects a central belief of Luminize: that stories can help us understand what medicine sometimes misses, and that listening more closely can be the beginning of meaningful change.
