Andre Villarente Perez CC’26 is a Biomedical Engineering student from the Philippines whose commitment to advancing equitable healthcare is rooted in firsthand experience with health-technology disparities in his home country. He founded LionHealth, Columbia’s first biomedical device engineering club, where he led students in developing free medical and assistive technologies for patients in hospitals across NYC. He deepened this passion through research, developing a low-cost HIV diagnostic device for underserved communities in sub-Saharan Africa at the Sia Lab and innovating a non-invasive focused-ultrasound platform for breast cancer treatment in the Konofagou Lab. On-campus, Perez was a patient advocate at Columbia Health’s Gay Health Advocacy Project, providing access to sexual and reproductive healthcare for students, and helped lead JADE, a Columbia winter program to help underrepresented students gain access to tech and startups. He’s also a volunteer simulation technician at Cornell Medicine, and spearheads CAUSE-Philippines, a nonprofit that has helped 100-plus low-income Filipino high-schoolers secure full-ride scholarships to universities abroad.