Originally from San Francisco, Aracelia is a current MS2 here at EVMS. She attended Claremont McKenna College, where she majored in Neuroscience and minored in Gender and Sexuality Studies before spending a few gap years here at EVMS in the two-year Medical Master’s Program.
During her M1 year, Aracelia worked with Natascha Heise, MD in the Pathology and Anatomy Department, creating and teaching an anatomy lecture to pre-health undergraduate students in the Britt Scholars program. The project measured the effectiveness of virtual reality as an educational tool.
As an EVMS Summer Scholar, she worked with Yifan Guo, MD and the CHKD Plastics Department on a project that traced long term speech therapy outcomes in bilingual patients with cleft lip and/or palate. Aracelia also spent time in in University of Califormia San Francisco’s Surgical Oncology research lab, researching quality of life outcomes for patients who underwent laparoscopic splenectomy for massive and supramassive splenomegaly.
In her free time, Aracelia loves to ski, do yoga, read, swim at the beach, play water polo with the local Hampton Roads team, and spend time with family and friends. She is passionate about getting more women into surgical specialties as well as advocating for underserved patient populations.
As the Research & Mentorship Chair for the American Medical Women’s Association, Aracelia is working on a series of “Intro to Research” workshops in an effort to increase accessibility and transparency for EVMS students who may be newer to research.
On campus, Aracelia serves as Outreach Coordinator for Latinx Medical Student Association, is president of the Association for Women Surgeons, acts as both Lead Continuity Coordinator at the EVMS HOPES Clinic and Ultrasound and Clinical Skills representative for the Class of 2026 and serves as an Admissions Ambassador.