Jiya was born in San Francisco, CA, and spent her formative years in Marin. She was raised by two loving parents alongside her younger sister, Nisha.
She discovered her love for dance in preschool, and spent her childhood dancing with Marin Dance Theatre, a pre-professional ballet school. Within the school, she has participated in 27 different performances with over eighty roles. In the past five years she has performed many soloist roles, such as Carlotta, Margarita, and Scheherazade within her school’s production of Sophie and the Enchanted Toyshop. She has worked with numerous established choreographers and teachers throughout her years, including Joanna Berman, Andrea Basile, Ben Needham-Wood, Dawn Perrin and Pierre Francois Vilanoba. Jiya has continued to pursue her love for dance by participating in many different auditions, where she was offered placement in summer intensives at Ballet West Academy, Colorado Ballet School, and Joffrey Ballet School, and also hopes to pursue her passion in college.
In high school, Jiya chose to pursue a career in chemistry, inspired by her 10th grade chemistry teacher. She worked as an assistant lab technician and teacher within her school, preparing labs for students and aiding the teacher in the classroom. She continued this work through the summer, setting up for the year ahead by preparing materials and creating new organizational systems for the school’s numerous labs.
In her senior year of high school, Jiya joined Marin Academy’s Research Collaborative, where she worked with a cohort of ten students to genetically modify Drosophila (fruit fly) lineages to create a target fly. These flies will be used by Stanford’s School of Medicine in the Kim Laboratory to research pancreatic cancer and diabetes. Through this class, she learned her passion for research, and hopes to become an established scientific researcher in the future, working with model organisms such as fruit flies to create new medicines and vaccines.
