“This series of photographs was taken in various regions of Japan ranging from Nagano to Hiroshima.”

Serena Zheng is a second-year medical student at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. She studied biological sciences and biotechnology at the University of Southern California, where she concomitantly dabbled in photography. She believes that in a society as fast-paced as ours, photography is becoming all the more important because it allows us to explore the world at our own pace. In her excessive amount of free time, Serena enjoys scuba diving in glacier water, skiing in non-east coast terrain, playing tennis with friends, photographing landscapes and wildlife, and most of all, napping.