Mariah Everett
After graduating from Swarthmore College in 2018, Mariah did a summer internship at the Clinic for Special Children. Mariah’s research was a natural history study of Familial Focal Epilepsy with Variable Foci among the Old Order Mennonites caused by mutations in NPRL3 and DEPDC5. She returned to the Clinic as a full-time Research Assistant in 2020, working on PKU, TNNT1 myopathy, and Spinal Muscular Atrophy (SMA) studies. Mariah returned to the Clinic in the summer of 2024 for a clinical rotation as a fourth-year medical student at Harvard Medical School.
“At the Clinic, I saw that limited resources did not necessarily condemn a person to illness and suffering, that a small number of physicians could profoundly change the health landscape of a community, and that, maybe, I could be a part of that change. They showed me the moral imperative of increasing healthcare access for the most vulnerable among us and understanding disease within a community and even more broadly within a social and historical context. The Clinic gave me hope that a radically different future for patients with rare diseases is possible.”