P.D. Soros Fellowship for New Americans

Cynthia He was born in Shanghai, China. Her parents and grandparents had been sent to rural farms for re-education during the Cultural Revolution. She and her parents moved to California soon after she was born. 

As a sophomore at Stanford, Cynthia began working in the neonatology lab of David Stevenson, studying potential therapies for neonatal jaundice. This work was published in the journal Pediatric Research and also led to the Firestone Medal, Stanford's highest honor for undergraduate research. She graduated in 2010 in Biological Sciences with honors in Neurobiology. Cynthia has been a pianist since a young age and also completed a minor in Music during college.

Cynthia completed her M.D. and Ph.D in Neuroscience in the Medical Scientist Training Program at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. For her dissertation research in the laboratory of Carlos Portera-Cailliau, Cynthia studied how cortical networks and sensory processing mechanisms develop aberrantly in Fragile X Syndrome (the most common inherited form of autism). As a medical student, Cynthia served in multiple leadership roles on the Medical Student Council and Medical Education Committee.

After graduating from medical school in 2019, Cynthia began residency training in Psychiatry at UCSF. Her interests include mood disorders, anxiety disorders, eating disorders, and developmental trajectories of psychiatric illness; as well as health systems improvement, cultural psychiatry, and narrative medicine. Her writing has been published in JAMA, Doximity, and Pulse—voices from the heart of medicine.