October 12, 2022

Spotlight: Ali Ahmed seeks to reduce barriers to care through a career in health policy

When Ali Ahmed moved from Florida to Seattle in 2018, he never could have imagined the accomplishments and experiences he would experience. It was not just the culture and food that had Ahmed excited but also the professional and educational opportunities that come with living in a city as large as Seattle.

In fact, the summer before his freshman year saw Ahmed immersed in a research opportunity at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center. That experience – and being able to understand health barriers and how they affect marginalized communities – factored significantly into his academic pursuits and aspirations.

“I keep finding that even at premier hospitals and research centers, there are so many barriers to care that it threatens the application and implementation of research and innovation,” he said.

Ahmed graduated from UW this past June where he majored in political science while on a pre-medical track. The choice of political science as his major allowed him to explore his interests in health policy as well as areas such as bioengineering, economics, chemistry and physics.

His interest in the health policy field was seeded during a first-year civil learning class called Homelessness in Seattle. In it he was able to incorporate his interests in the social determinants of health and connect it with his real-world observations.

“It was my first exposure not only engaging in volunteering activities in the Seattle area but also an opportunity to reflect on them,” he said.

A big support to Ahmed was Carol Levin, a University of Washington professor of Global Health. Levin taught Global Health Economics (GH 345) and mentored Ahmed throughout his time at UW. Her teachings were an integral part of Ahmed’s future research.

“Now working in Boston, I find myself applying much of what professor Levin taught me,” he said.

Ahmed continued to explore research interests during his time working with the Population Health Applied Research Fellowship. The 10-week program helps support student’s work on real-world population health challenges. Participants receive training in research skills, data collection, analysis and presentation of findings and recommendations to an external client.

Ahmed says the Applied Research Fellowship was an opportunity to study population data and figure out where there are gaps and inequities in social determinants of health. Analyzing infrastructure policies, education levels, access to transportation and creating geospatial visualization tools to identify areas of disproportionate burden were all activities in which he engaged.

Ahmed valued the interdisciplinarity perspectives of the fellowship. He noted there were several people from widely ranging backgrounds, environmental, public policy, applied mathematics and economics.

“We were able to learn a lot from each other,” he said.

Ahmed says he’s also following the current cohort, sharing, “It’s fascinating to see how this cohort will approach the same issues that we approached but through a very different lens.”

Ahmed participated in other extracurricular activities beyond the fellowship. He conducted research at the Institute for Stem Cell & Regenerative Medicine, was President of Phi Delta Epsilon Medical Fraternity and volunteered with the Seattle medical team and the Harverview Vaccination Clinic.

When asked whether it was hard to balance all his outside extracurricular activities with schoolwork, Ahmed shared that it was hard to find motivation from just doing classes alone. Engaging in activities like research and volunteering added context to him. These experiences allowed him to understand why he studied topics such as health policy.

Ahmed is currently working in Boston at the Medical Practice Evaluation Center, an interdisciplinary team of researchers from Harvard and Massachusetts General Hospital. There he takes clinical data and runs computer models to simulate and forecast clinical and economic outcomes of HIV interventions.

Ahmed plans on working in Boston for the next two years before applying to medical school and pursuing a career path in health policy.