Monica is a journalist whose work has appeared in Forbes, CNN, NBC, Yahoo News, Teen Vogue, Thrive Global and POOSH. She won a Front Page Award for local reporting in the breaking news category in October 2020. She is an associate producer for CNN digital and a Forbes contributor, covering female entrepreneurs in healthcare. Prior to that Monica worked at CNN New York's news bureau gathering news for digital and television and contributing stories for CNN Digital News. Monica graduated from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism where she pursued longform narrative writing, news stories, and features focused on social injustice. She also studied video production and is versed in editing software. Along with some of her classmates Monica reported and published a story in an anthology that is available for purchase on Amazon.

Monica holds a juris doctor degree from Pepperdine University School of Law, where she contributed articles for Pepperdine Law Communications, received the CALI award for the highest grade in a course and assisted veterans with criminal record expungement. She also received a certificate from the school's Straus Institute -- the nation's number one ranked dispute resolution program, and she worked in the Special Education Advocacy Clinic where she contributed to a brief to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Previously, Monica earned a bachelor of arts degree in history from the University of California San Diego where she served as copy editor of the university's newspaper and senior editor of Prospect, Journal of International Affairs. She is fluent in Spanish and Farsi/Dari.