Maia Mansour
Maia Mansour was born in 2004 in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. Mansour’s Palestinian immigrant family moved from Dubai to the United States before she started school; she grew up in Oregon and, in 2022, graduated from the International School of Beaverton as valedictorian.
From there, Mansour enrolled at Oregon State University as a Bioengineering/Pre-Med major. During her first year at Oregon State, she was a part of URSA (Undergraduate Research Scholar Award) Engage where she worked in the Plastics to Fuel Lab under the mentorship of Chemical Engineering professor Skip Rochefort. Through this experience, she learned that her passions aligned more with the Chemical Engineering degree rather than Bioengineering, as she was interested in the pharmaceutical field. After completing her first year she received a Johnson Engineering Internship at Oregon Health and Science University, where she was able to combine two of her interests: medicine and engineering.
At the time of her interview, Mansour was in her second year at Oregon State University, working as an Undergraduate Learning Assistant for the Engineering 100 series and also continuing on in the Plastics to Fuel lab.