Joya Ahmad

Joya Ahmad (she/her) is a second-year medical student at SUNY Downstate in Brooklyn, NY. She is a member of her school’s Medical Education and Health Equity, Advocacy, and Leadership Scholarly Tracks and is passionate about dismantling harmful beliefs and practices
in the medical field through curricular reform and innovation. Her current research centers on LGBTQIA+-inclusive medical education, though she is also involved in projects on reproductive healthcare knowledge and access, weight bias, and palliative care. Outside of medicine, she is a poet, a distance runner, and a devoted cat mom. As a queer woman of color and the first in her family to attend medical school, she is acutely aware of the ways in which the medical industrial complex can be exclusionary and hostile to people who do not fit its predetermined norms, and she is passionate about dismantling obstacles to care and nourishing a more equitable culture of education and practice.