University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill
Ethics Scholar & Outreach Director
Parr Center for Ethics
Ria Saxena
Ria Saxena is a junior at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, studying neuroscience. She serves as Ethics Scholar and Outreach Director at the Parr Center for Ethics, where she leads discussions on healthcare ethics and participates in the broader ethics and philosophy community on campus.
Her research sits at the intersection of neuroscience, ethics, and social justice. She developed the concept of structural neuroconstraint — the way social infrastructure systematically limits the neural capacities children need for reasoning, autonomy, and full participation in society — and has presented this work at the 2026 Neuroethics Conference.
Ria is on the path to medical school. She is a volunteer in the Emergency Department and Nursing Rehab Unit at UNC Health, and a research intern at the UNC School of Medicine's Institute for Trauma Recovery, where she supports clinical studies on post-traumatic care for sexual assault survivors. She is also an undergraduate research member of the UNC Gender-Based Violence Research Group.
Her work consistently returns to one question: what are the structural and social conditions that shape health long before a patient reaches a clinic? Food for Thoughts is her answer — or at least, the beginning of one.
Studying neuroscience at UNC while serving as Ethics Scholar at the Parr Center — bridging the science of the brain with the philosophical questions about what we owe each other.
Volunteering in the Emergency Department and Nursing Rehab Unit at UNC Health, and supporting clinical research on trauma recovery at the UNC School of Medicine.
On the path to medical school, with a commitment to practising medicine through the lens of social determinants — understanding that health begins long before the clinic.
Experience
Undergraduate Research Member
Participating in graduate-level research, systematic reviews, and producing original work for publication. Focusing on intimate partner violence, sexual violence, and clinical outcomes.
Volunteer — Emergency Department & Nursing Rehab
Volunteering at Hillsborough Hospital in the Emergency Department and Nursing Rehab Unit, and at UNC Main Campus Hospital in Discharge Patient Transport. Good Clinical Practice (GCP) certified.
Research Intern
Volunteer research assistant onboarding sexual assault survivors for high-quality clinical studies aimed at improving and tracking post-traumatic care. Working with REDCap and clinical data management tools.
Ethics Scholar and Outreach Director
Promoting ethical discussions in relation to healthcare within the Neuroethics Pod as Outreach Director. Participating in the broader ethics and philosophy community on campus.
Early Start Associate
Market research internship at a leading consumer health and household products company.
The question that started it
At a neuroethics conference in 2026, Ria presented a deceptively simple thought experiment: imagine two children. One with consistent, reliable nutrition every day. One with no guarantee of when or what the next meal might be. We instinctively call that an economic disparity or a difference in circumstance. But what if it's something more fundamental?
"Can we meaningfully talk about autonomy and equal opportunity if the neural foundations of decision-making are unequally distributed?"
This isn't rhetorical for Ria. It's a research programme. The first 1,000 days of life — from conception to age two — are when synaptogenesis, myelination, and neuroplasticity are at their most consequential and most vulnerable. Disrupting them through food insecurity doesn't just cause hunger. It reshapes the architecture of the mind.
Why medicine
Every role on Ria's CV points in the same direction: upstream. From the trauma recovery research to the Emergency Department volunteering to the gender-based violence studies — she is systematically building an understanding of how social and structural conditions create the patients that medicine later treats.
Food for Thoughts is the practical extension of that instinct: a foundation that takes the neuroethical argument seriously enough to act on it, built by someone who intends to spend her career working at exactly this intersection of science, ethics, and care.