Advancing Global Surgical Care
Ahmad Ozair was a medical student in India when his grandfather had a heart attack. Instead of an ambulance, the emergency services sent a small van with little equipment.
At the hospital, where Ozair worked with the house staff to begin treating his grandfather, he realized that the angioplasty suite at one of India’s largest residential hospital was closed. Also, there was no aspirin available on the unit, so Ozair left to purchase aspirin and other essential medicines at a pharmacy.
“I hope to become an effective advocate for those deprived of surgical care globally.”
This experience ignited his interest in global health disparities and research. Scrubbing into surgeries as a visiting medical student in Kansas, Texas, and Missouri, he saw further health inequities at play and developed an interest in providing high quality global surgical care. This led him to co-found the first clinical research training organization for medical trainees in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous province. The organization works to enlist medical students and residents, with the goal of calling attention to global health disparities through research.
In 2019, Ozair received funding from the Indian government to pursue research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he developed a passion for neurosurgery. He graduated medical school at the top of his class in 2022, having published more than 40 research papers, and earned a postgraduate certificate in global clinical research from Harvard Medical School. Following a research fellowship in Miami in neurooncology, he entered the MPH program at the Bloomberg School, where he is working to hone his skills in epidemiology and biostatistics.
“I want my clinical research to help advance data-driven health policies that ensure access to the highest quality surgical care worldwide,” he says.
