Sharifa is pursuing a Ph.D. at Harvard University in the Systems, Synthetic and Quantitative Biology program. Her research focuses on creating multimodal machine learning models for diagnosis, prognosis and treatment of patients. She holds a dual degree in computer science and biology from Union College. Prior to Harvard, Sharifa was a software engineer at Google in the Software Engineering Residency program. She is currently Director of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at the Harvard Graduate Biotechnology Club.