Zoya Ahmed
Hometown: New Orleans, Louisiana
Website:
Biography
Zoya Ahmed is a Presidential Award scholar at Xavier University of Louisiana, majoring in Public Health Sciences with minors in Biology, Chemistry, and History. She is a rising senior planning to pursue a MD/PhD, focusing on bridging the gap between clinical medicine and community-level public health interventions. Her time as a community member and as a Ochsner-Xavier Institute for Health Equity Research (OXIHER) is what defined her passion for managing insulin resistance related diseases through traditional and holistic care.
Zoya’s research interests are centered on the physiological and environmental drivers of insulin resistance and Type 2 diabetes. This summer, she aims to investigate how epigenetics, psychosocial stressors, and dietary inflammatory markers contribute to metabolic dysfunction within high-risk populations and how these factors may lead to disproportionate health diagnoses and outcomes.
In her free time, Zoya enjoys spending time with her large family, shopping, reading classics and dystopian novels, and watching movies. She would like to travel more to culturally enrich herself in language, art, and history.
