When Life Doesn't Pause for Med School

Growing up, Diya Mathur MED-Tuck ’26 watched people she loved delay care until their health grew dire. Money and medicine, it seemed, were as entwined as two serpents on a caduceus. “I recognized how the cost of care can directly be a barrier for patients and families to access care,” she says.

While most medical students learn to balance their own lives against the demands of training, Mathur has made balance itself the subject of her work. In anesthesiology, keeping a patient stable means holding the heart, lungs, and kidneys in equilibrium through surgery. In healthcare policy, it means working within the “Iron Triangle,” a model where cost, access, and quality exist in tension. For Mathur, progress is learning how to navigate that system—deliberatively, creatively—so that each part strengthens the whole.

Past is Prologue

One summer interning at HCA Healthcare in Nashville, Tennessee, Mathur recalls seeing physicians solve clinical problems in a corporate setting. Quickly, she realized, she “didn’t have to choose one or the other,” medicine or business.

So she chose both, by pursuing Dartmouth’s joint MD-MBA program, a five-year degree offered jointly through Geisel School of Medicine and Tuck School of Business, and one of few programs in the country where medical and business degrees are earned under the same roof, each informing the other in real time.

Mathur’s vision for bridging medicine and business caught the attention of Geisel’s faculty, who nominated her for the Syvertsen Fellowship, the school’s most prestigious student honor. Each year, faculty select six students as Syvertsen Scholars, then name one as the sole fellow. This year, that distinction went to Mathur.

Me Search is Research

Her research portfolio makes it clear why. Mathur’s projects span from designing 3D-printed robotic arms to analyzing the sensorimotor neurology of primates. Still, nearly every endeavor returns to questions of cost, access, and quality.

During medical school, she worked at Mass General Brigham analyzing Medicaid Accountable Care Organizations. She also co-led a study on “financial toxicity,” examining how cancer treatment decisions affect patients, caregivers, and healthcare systems. Now, with mentorship from Amber Barnato, MD, MPH, MS, director of The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice at Geisel, she’s writing a manuscript on the economics of end-of-life care.

Insights from Mathur’s research have already garnered national attention. In early 2026, she won first place at the American Society of Anesthesiologists’ business conference for a project that improved endoscopy suite efficiency at Dartmouth Health’s Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center.

Her success is underpinned by an ability to iterate. After Mathur co-founded a Diabetes Awareness and Prevention Program for rural migrant workers in 2022, her team faced a roadblock with its design. So Mathur and her team set out to design the clinic model, partnering with community organizations that already served migrant farmworkers. The revised approach worked. And in 2024, the Endocrine Society recognized the program for its impact on health disparities in New Hampshire and Vermont.

Homeostasis Where the Heart Is

Today, Mathur practices her own version of self-care. Community. Running. Journaling. Meditating. “I’m hopeful that building these skills now will help me take better care of patients and respond to the really difficult things we see in medicine, in a healthy way,” she says.