We’re a diverse team united by a passion for writing and writing well, as well as by the awareness that imaginative, robust storytelling lies at the heart of the biomedical sciences.
Tobin Daniel, an Anastomosis editor and contributor, doing a reading at the 2025 magazine launch party.
Masthead
Editors in Chief
Saumya Bharti
Sarah J. Rockwood
Editors
Siwaar Abouhala
Molly K. Barron
Elise Cai
Tobin Daniel
Jacqueline M. Genovese
Sofia Gurgel
Sheharbano Jafry
Julia Li
Bryant Lin
Brian Zhang
Recruitment for the editorial board typically begins in the fall of every year. Keep an eye out for future updates and news. The majority of our team is composed of Stanford Medicine medical or physician assistant students, though we do solicit issue contributions and occasional freelance work from all over the world.
Sarah Rockwood is a 4th year MD-PhD student studying neonatal brain injury in labs of Dr. Anca Pasca and Dr. Ryann Fame in the Stem Cell Biology program. While she moved around a lot growing up, she considers Berkeley her home and attended UC Berkeley for undergrad, where she worked on the Daily Californian newspaper and took creative non fiction and poetry writing courses. She worked at Gladstone/UCSF for two years after graduating in the lab of Dr. Todd McDevitt. She is most interested in pursuing a career in research, emergency medicine, writing, trail running, and outdoor adventure. She loves to write poetry, creative non fiction, flash fiction, and memoir style pieces. She dreams to work on a book during medical school alongside helping to run Anastomosis Magazine and help it become an eminent international publication.
Saumya Bharti is an MS2 committed to integrative psychiatry and narrative medicine, approaching medical care as a living, breathing form of practical storytelling. With a background in community health and food systems, she understands medicine as a community-rooted practice—one that listens for context, memory, and meaning alongside symptoms. She is driven by the belief that medicine must be made more humane, and that art is not an accessory to this work, but its foundation. Outside of medicine, she is drawn to storytelling in all its forms—poetry, prose, and visual art—and can often be found in the shadows of underground music shows, somewhere across an ocean, or curled up in bed with her cat, reading comics.
Brian Zhang is an MS1 from Brooklyn, New York. He believes that medicine is an inherently, unmistakably human profession and is therefore incomplete without storytelling. He enjoys writing medical fiction and prose. In his free time, he cafe-hops with friends. Brian graduated from Yale University in 2025.
Julia Li is a second year MSPA candidate at Stanford University and is a co-chair for Community Outreach. Her work has appeared in R2: Rice Review, the Rice Thresher, and Blood and Thunder Magazine. Julia is a recipient of the 2022 Max Apple Prize in Creative Nonfiction and the 2022 George G Williams Prize in Creative Writing, and she is the recipient of the 2023 Schumann Brother’s Grant for Travel Journalism and 2022 English Minter Summer Scholars Scholarship. She attended Tin House’s Summer Workshop in Summer 2024 and was accepted to the Writing Workshops New Orleans Fiction Cohort and Monterey Writing Retreat in 2025. When she is not found in class or working on her writing, she is going to hot yoga, making matcha lattes for her friends, or going on runs. Her favorite genre to write is science fiction.
Sofia is an editor and one of the co-outreach leads. She is an MS1 from Brazil, passionate about both science and storytelling, and she loves working on projects that bring together different disciplines and perspectives. She especially enjoys writing creative nonfiction and exploring how personal stories intersect with broader social issues. In her free time, Sofia loves to travel, watch sports, play tennis, and bake something sweet.
Siwaar Abouhala (pronounced like “Sea-waar Ah-bu-ha-la,” she/her) is a first-year medical student at Stanford and is serving as as a Community Co-Lead for Anastomosis this year. She enjoys narrative storytelling, spoken word poetry, blog-style writing, and medical journalism.
📝 Fun fact - Siwaar is launching an initiative called RxReport: a journalism hub for health care providers. If you’re a health professions student or clinician and interested in training as a scientific journalist, please reach out: siwaar@stanford.edu
Molly Barron is a first-year medical student at Stanford from Philadelphia, PA. She’s been interested in medical humanities since she first began her path to medicine, and is very excited to be serving on the Anastomosis board this year. She believes that medicine is full of stories, and that comunicating through written and spoken word is one of the most important things clinicians can do alongside their care. She enjoys poetry, narrative non-fiction, and medical journalism – all ways to tell the stories that matter.
Fun fact: Her favorite book is Being Mortal by Atul Gawande, and she encourages anyone to reach out to her for her other medical literature recommendations!