I’m a very family oriented person. Although I’ve lived in the US most of my life, I’m an immigrant. Growing up, I was definitely connected to my Pakistani roots. Those connections shape the way I speak, the way I show affection, even the names of my dogs, Surmai and Motuu. The doggos are almost always good boys but on rare naughty occasions, the scolding is in Urdu. 

As a child, the experience of seeing my mother poked and prodded in hospital rooms shaped me. Maybe it drove me away from every immigrant parents’ wish for a medical doctor in the family. But a BA in Health, an MPH and finally a PhD in Public Health have seen me squish right up against the field. Professionally, I made my way to public health after taking on roles in sales and communications as I took whatever work was available to make ends meet. These jobs gave me the opportunity to travel and to appreciate what a privilege it is to spend my days and nights working on projects that have deep personal meaning for me.

Those projects include consulting for organizations that help other non-profits implement best practices and reach their goals of impacting public policy and the private sector. My public health work has largely been aimed at helping under-served populations. I’ve worked with fathers during pregnancy and shortly after their child’s birth and to combat intimate partner violence and anti-Black racism in South Asian American and South Asian immigrant communities. I’ve studied public health program design and management as well as diversity, equity, inclusivity and justice related interventions to facilitate anti-oppressive organizational practices.

I believe that we are at a crossroad and we can choose to continue the way we’ve been going all this time or we can take another path and orient towards justice. The AO work I do is to push people and organizations towards meaningful change. We aren’t just asking folks to be better allies in the workplace. We are trying to set up the conditions that would make allyship in the workplace redundant. We want to help change people at their core and help them impact the organizations and communities they make up. That’s the basis of our approach.

My research and work in public health examining various harms that different marginalized communities face offers me a chance to help create an even playing field. I did not seek out anti-oppression. It found me and captivated my attention when I was trying to make sense of the evidence-first, people-last (or never) approach to public health that I encountered. I’ve been impacted by the medical profession and now I have a role in shaping health care pedagogy and maybe by extension practice and policy. It is not a responsibility that I take lightly.