HST MD 2024 grad Alaleh Azhir
Her goal is to investigate how health conditions may present differently according to gender, and how to devise more effective treatments for women accordingly.
Mindy Blodgett | HST-IMES
“My story begins in Iran,” says Alaleh Azhir, “Where women experience oppression.” For the 2024 Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology (HST) MD graduate, this central fact of her early childhood, has informed Azhir’s research and clinical focus: improving health care delivery for women, and exploring and understanding the disparities in how women are diagnosed and treated.
“I've always wanted to do something to empower women,” says Azhir, who received a BS in biomedical engineering, computer science, and applied mathematics and statistics from Johns Hopkins in 2019; and a Master’s in statistical science from the University of Oxford in 2020. “Medicine has been a science that was developed years ago by men, for men, and then applied to women. For example, women often experience heart attacks differently than men. I want to dedicate my career to understanding how conditions common to men and women may present differently in women, and how to ensure a better, more effective treatment for them.”
Azhir was 14 when she and her mother, emigrated to the United States. Working on a new life, in a new country, was a major challenge for Azhir, and for her single mother.
A Rhodes and Barry Goldwater Scholar, Azhir applied for medical school, after receiving her master’s at Oxford. She says that what drew her to HST included the “more engineering aspects of the combination of MIT, as well as Harvard, and a high focus on pre-clinical courses—teaching you to think more about the science behind the medicine.” She said that Iranian high school students must choose between a math or science focus, “and I never wanted to have to make that choice, as I loved both.”
As a new high school student in the US, she says that sometimes her struggles with English led to teachers assuming she lacked the knowledge to take difficult courses—but that this simply inspired her to take extra online courses, eventually becoming a successful AP student, and the captain of her high school math team.
This determination has aided her on her path to HST, and to becoming an MD. She was named a recipient of the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans in 2021—becoming one of the 30 among the 2,400 applicants—who received a $90,000 merit-based fellowship toward graduate education for immigrants, and the children of immigrants.
During her time at HST, her investigations have focused beyond the typical “unisex” aspect of research (not considering sex differences in the way men and women experience disease)—doing this by applying math and engineering tools to large genetic datasets—to better analyze the differences. She worked with David Page, a member of the Whitehead Institute, who received an MD from HST, and whose Page Laboratory “studies the genetic differences between males and females and the biological and medical ramifications of these differences” according to his online profile.
Azhir was a member of the class that started during the height of the Covid pandemic, in the fall of 2020, meaning that “our entire first year was on Zoom.” Despite these challenges, she recalls that “our class bonded really well together—we did things like dressing up for Halloween for our Zoom classes…being able to be a part of an incredible community was one of the reasons I chose HST.” She says that her class has become very close, traveling to Iceland and New Zealand together.
“I have fond memories of when we were able to return to campus and to in-person teaching, and we were able to take a condensed version of an anatomy class, which was wonderful,” Azhir says. “This was our first direct experience with dissections…we were able to see the beauty of human bodies, which was so important. Prior to that, during our Zoom-only classes, we were only able to watch videos. It was so valuable to be able to do this class in person.”
In addition to the challenges of learning during Covid, Azhir faced a personal medical challenge “that came out of nowhere.” Azhir remembers. “I had always had nearsightedness, but then halfway through my second year of medical school, I experienced a retinal detachment in one eye, whose course of treatment was complicated with operations and use of an experimental drugs.”
“It was right before finals when this happened,” she says. “Everyone was so supportive and so flexible, and they helped me to stay on track, and to meet my requirements…but I went through two years of instability. I’m so thankful to my HST advisors and friends who supported me.”
Azhir says she feels better now, and that she was recently married —with more than half of the wedding guest list made up of HST colleagues. The next step for Azhir is a medical residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in internal medicine, with the goal of becoming a cardiologist.
Azhir says she is deeply thankful to her mother, for her sacrifices in making the move to the US, and that “it’s been an interesting journey.”
She is also hoping to give back, grateful for the help she has received along the way—she has volunteered at hospitals and as a mentor to young students. She founded Frappa, a non-profit aimed at helping Iranian women seeking to apply to graduate programs abroad. Her hobbies are fashion, art, and dance.
But, most importantly, “I’m hoping to be part of the change in how medicine is practiced, especially when it comes to treating heart disease in women using computational tools.”