Rita was born and raised in Belarus. Driven by natural curiosity, she started to explore the world around her and got particularly excited about genetics and biotechnology. After winning the International Biology Olympiad at the age of 17, she entered a pharmacy school to pursue her dream of becoming a drug developer to save lives by fighting cancer. She was quickly disheartened by a boring conservative education and lack of perspectives in her country and was eager to make a positive change. She worked on creating exchange opportunities for Belarusian students and fought for their rights by organizing educational events and cooperating with student organizations across the country. An avid enthusiast of multiple disciplines including health care, education, biology, and social change, she took advantage of whatever exciting opportunity showed up. After entering Minerva, she realized that technology is an effective and long-standing solution to most of the problems she cared about. Thanks to the breadth of Minerva curriculum, she got exposed to computer science and started to explore the fields of data analysis and machine learning. While living in South Korea, she worked on designing a novel predictive model for a promising genome-editing technology. It was the first step towards her goal of solving global problems by creating technological solutions. Rita is doing her best to make her dreams come true and constantly searches for opportunities that will teach her things she didn't even know she could learn.

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