Sapphire was an undergraduate in the lab from 2012-2014 and graduated from UCR in 2014.
Sapphire was raised in Long Beach, California by her Cambodian refugee family and she studied Conservation Biology at UC Riverside, where she was heavily involved in health education, mentorship, and advocacy for people with special needs. The trauma and violence her Khmer community experienced sparked her passion in working with the urban underserved early on, and her most transformative experience was working at UCLA Community School with City Year, an education nonprofit dedicated to serving youth at-risk for dropping out. This experience taught her how multifaceted health disparities were and it cemented her desire to work at the interface of medicine and social justice. She also served as a Service Ambassador for City Year, transforming schools and empowering civic engagement through beautification projects all over South Los Angeles.
She completed an MPH at Harvard Chan School of Public Health and is currently [a Resident Physician](https://profiles.ucsf.edu/sapphire.ear] at UCSF after earning her MD at UCSF in 2022.