Dr. Nadia Abuelezam grew up in an Arab immigrant family as the daughter of two Palestinian refugees. Her mother spent her childhood in Kuwait while her father was in a Lebanese refugee camp. As a first-generation Arab American college student majoring in mathematical biology, she wasn’t interested in “math for math’s sake.” She wanted to do science that would directly impact her community.
Abuelezam went on to do her doctoral work in epidemiology at Harvard, making mathematical models of how HIV spreads in South Africa, which took her to South Africa and Uganda. While she deeply valued her research, she felt pulled to study health disparities for Arab Americans.
“I always had a sense that I wanted to do work that would help my community and not only help the community but help me better understand my community,” she says.
At Harvard, colleagues didn’t encourage her to pursue her interest in Arab American health. The topic didn’t feel as pressing to them as HIV research, which she understood. But she also felt like ethnic and racial health disparities were underappreciated as a field of study, precisely because they can be so personal to the scientists themselves.
“The people working on health disparities have a reason to work on health disparities,” she says. “Either they’re trying to help their communities or they’re trying to do work that’s personally meaningful, and I do think there’s a bit of stigma around that in the field of public health. When we think about the majority of scholars who are doing health disparities work, I think you find that they are people of color, and that produces this really ugly cycle of devaluing work by communities of color for communities of color.”
“It’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about,” she added. “And I’ve been trying to break that cycle.”
Now, as an assistant professor of nursing at Boston College, Abuelezam’s research focuses on health disparities in the Arab American community. She also runs a collaborative research group of 15 young scholars across the country interested in Arab American health and serves as the co-chair of the diversity and inclusion committee for the Society for Epidemiological Research.
