PhD 2024 in the geography department, with an NSF IGERT Traineeship in network science. She received her undergraduate degree from the University of Washington, Seattle in microbiology, and a masters of public health from the University of California, Berkeley in infectious diseases and vaccinology. Following her undergraduate studies, Vania joined the US Peace Corps to serve as a community health volunteer in Vanuatu, a small archipelago nation in the South Pacific. There, she helped create participatory health education curriculums for HIV education; and lead infrastructure projects that brought toilets and clean drinking water to her village. After receiving her MPH, Vania received the Allan Rosenfield Global Health Fellowship with the US CDC Global AIDS Program, to lead population size estimation of HIV key populations in Beijing, China. At UC Santa Barbara, Vania is interested to further explore infectious disease transmission among human populations--specifically diseases of global health importance that traverse human networks--through mathematical and computational models.