Leen Arnaout is a Ph.D. candidate in the UC Berkeley–UCSF Graduate Program in Bioengineering. She received her B.S. in Biomedical Engineering from Boston University, where she worked on medical device design and CRISPR engineering before transitioning to bioinformatics in graduate school. In Dr. Marina Sirota's lab at UCSF, Leen leverages computational and biostatistical methods to study how maternal microbiome changes throughout pregnancy are associated with birth outcomes, particularly preterm birth—a global public health concern affecting 1 in 10 pregnancies. She is working to formalize pathways for identifying subclinical infections early in pregnancy to enable timely interventions that could reduce preterm birth risk.