I am passionate about global health, specifically child development in low and middle income countries. Being from Pakistan, I wanted to address the problem of child mental underdevelopment in my country of birth. This issue is particularly important to address because not only can ensuring better mental development improve the lives of the children themselves, but as more individuals are able to escape poverty by following full developmental trajectories, they will have the opportunity to contribute to tackling the social and environmental challenges that we all face. Knowing this, I have been utilizing my education background in the Health Sciences program at the University of Calgary and have started working at the Alberta Children’s Hospital Research Institute to culturally adapt and implement the Care for Child Development program made by the World Health Organization in Pakistan. Through this, I hope thousands of children across Pakistan will be able to reach their developmental potentials.

Youth substance abuse can greatly impact an individual’s health and overall life outcomes as I came to find out through my high school experience. Therefore, I have attempted to address this problem through various initiatives. Having personally seen the negative impact of youth cannabis abuse, I formed an education technology startup, Inform Cannabis, making a game based education platform to develop social and emotional competencies in students to reduce likelihood of substance abuse. We won the Alberta Health Services Launchpad Pitch competition and are hoping to pilot our intervention in schools by next year. Furthermore, through my role at the Airdrie Board of Youth Affairs (ABYA), I have been advocating for youth issues while working with the City of Airdrie. As vaping has become a rampant problem for youth, I led the development of a grass root vaping intervention through the ABYA. We worked with youth from the community to create a vaping information campaign and I am now leading the evaluation of the intervention through a randomized control trial.

While living in Airdrie, my family was faced with a medical emergency that caused us to call 911, and to our surprise we were informed it was going to take almost 20 minutes for the ambulance to arrive. In our situation we were lucky that we could wait this long, but I realized how important it was to address Alberta’s first responder shortage. Following this, I have worked with the City of Airdrie Fire Department as well as Alberta Health Services to potentially pilot an app- based community responder program that would allow skilled community members to respond to medical emergencies before traditional first responders arrive.

Being an immigrant I have personally seen how difficult it can be to navigate bureaucracies, especially when you are not accustomed to the local language and culture. Wanting to help others in my situation, I along with friends founded Health Help Alberta, a non-profit dedicated to helping people from different cultural and language backgrounds navigate the healthcare system by connecting them with community based natural support systems.

Most importantly, throughout this I have become passionate about building partnerships to tackle social and environmental issues. I understand how important it is that partnerships between different organizations and individuals are formed in order to achieve success, whether that be integrating scientific approaches in the vaping campaign I helped develop or bringing together the City of Airdrie Fire department and Medical First Responder team at AHS hoping to tackle the problem of emergency responders. This topic of knowledge translation is something I hope to better understand to ensure that we can form the interdisciplinary teams needed to address our current challenges.