Team Member

Mariam is a PhD candidate in the I-TRIP Laboratory at NYU Steinhardt, working alongside her advisor, Dr. Ericka N. Merriwether. Her research follows something she could not stop noticing: how often pain goes unseen in people who are blind or have low vision — and how many of the tools clinicians reach for quietly assume a patient can see. Her dissertation brings together body-based testing, surveys, and the lived stories of people themselves to build a fuller, more honest picture of chronic pain in this community.

Her path here to I-TRIP was not a straight line. She trained as a physical therapist in Karachi, Pakistan, where a year of clinical rotations taught her to think about the whole body rather than one condition at a time. She later earned an MSc in Recreation in Pécs, Hungary, as a Stipendium Hungaricum scholar. Long before any of that, she was teaching physical fitness to blind and low-vision students back home — work that planted the seed for everything she studies now, and that earned her the World Leisure Organization’s Best Youth Volunteer award in 2021.

Alongside her research, Mariam is also an artist, and she often brings her own artwork into her scientific and professional presentations — a reminder that rigor and creativity are not opposites, and that some truths about pain are easier to reach through art than a chart.

Across three countries and two degrees, one commitment has stayed constant for her: research that reflects and serves everyone, not just the people who are easiest to study.