Asniya’s mission is to inspire and empower underserved Native American children with medical knowledge and opportunities.
Asniya is a non-profit outreach program that recruits medical students to teach health and medicine to indigenous children. "Asniya interns" deliver dynamic hands-on classroom presentations to captivate children’s interest in medical science, disease prevention, and careers in health care. For more than 25 years Asniya has inspired Native youth while expanding the cultural awareness of future physicians.
Miles Cunningham

Miles G. Cunningham earned a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1993 specializing in "Transplantation Strategies for the Analysis of Brain Development and Repair". He earned an MD from Harvard Medical School in 1995 with a special interest in neuropsychiatry and behavioral neurology.

During medical school he founded Asniya, a philanthropic program designed to introduce medicine and teach preventative care to Native American children living on remote and underprivileged reservations. He was the first Asniya intern and has remained an administrator of Asniya.

Dr. Cunningham received his residency training at the Massachusetts General and McLean Hospitals while continuing neuroscience research focusing on the study of the corticolimbic circuitry of psychopathology.

He presently administers and independent scientific initiative, The Laboratory of Neural Reconstruction, in which emotional circuitry and psychopathology are studied via precision engraftment of genetically engineered neural cells. Dr. Cunningham also co-founded the McLean Hospital Clerkship in Neuropsychiatry and Behavioral Neurology (NBN), serving six years supervising and mentoring medical students and residents in psychiatry.

He continues to mentor doctors-in-training as a staff physician at McLean Hospital serving as the Medical Director of the Lincoln Residence. Dr. Cunningham conducts a limited private practice specializing in neuropsychiatry, providing for his patients psychopharmacologic care, supportive, insight-guided, and interpersonal psychotherapy, and specialized cognitive and behavioral therapy.

"The path to one’s strength, pride, integrity, and wisdom often starts with a vision as a child. Our children may be granted visions in many ways. Often, it is through a teacher with a pure heart."
  • Asniya.org
    PO Box 746
    Rapid City, SD, 57709
    info@asniya.org