Rubab Malik

Rubab was born in rural Pakistan, where her family’s and village’s experiences with infectious diseases—particularly malaria—first sparked her interest in tropical diseases. Her firsthand exposure to infectious diseases within her home village and the transgenerational impact of healthcare disparities seen in resource-limited rural settings, including lack of access to adequate imaging services, served as an impetus for her initial interest in medicine, especially global rural health and diagnostic imaging.

Rubab completed her undergraduate studies at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where she studied Biophysics. She is currently a fourth-year medical student at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Rubab is passionate about physics/imaging technologies and global rural health, and she hopes to carry these interests hand-in-hand throughout her career. Rubab intends to pursue a career in diagnostic radiology with a focus on the utility and healthcare value of portable and cost-effective imaging modalities in resource-limited rural settings, such as the one she hails from.

What does the Kean Fellowship mean to you?
I am deeply honored to be a recipient of the 2023 Ben Kean Fellowship. During my undergraduate and medical training, immersing in global health from a radiology lens has not been as common as exploring global health from the perspectives of other medical specialties. Disparities in imaging access continue to impact rural and resource-limited settings, with two-thirds of the world’s population lacking access to any basic imaging. Thankfully, with artificial intelligence and portable, more cost-effective imaging modalities rising in popularity, there has been an increased emphasis on the use of these modalities to assist in diagnosis and to improve our understanding of the pathophysiology of common illnesses in such settings.  I am excited to explore this further with my Kean Fellowship project, focusing on the utility of point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS) and radiography to assess cardiopulmonary sequalae of severe malaria, a topic that is understudied and underreported on, and a topic I am personally invested in. The Kean Fellowship has granted me a unique opportunity to propose and carry out a clinical research project that combines my interest in global rural health and infectious diseases, guided by my family’s experiences in rural Pakistan, with my interest in diagnostic imaging.
 
It is an incredible honor to be part of a community with other Kean fellows and learn about their impactful dedication to global health and tropical medicine.

What do you anticipate learning?
I look forward to learning directly from local healthcare teams in northern rural Zambia about their approaches to triage, manage and treat severe malaria cases in children and adults in a holoendemic region. I am also very excited for this unique opportunity to learn more about the role of diagnostic imaging in improving our understanding of complications of malaria in a rural setting, and I am privileged to be able to work closely with a pediatric cardiologist with specific expertise in echocardiography to learn to obtain and interpret images. In addition, I feel privileged to have this opportunity to further my understanding about the community needs specific to rural Zambia, particularly community needs at the intersection of infectious diseases and diagnostic imaging related to the role of imaging in informing our understanding of disease processes commonly seen there, such as severe malaria due to Plasmodium falciparum. Cardiopulmonary complications of severe malaria remain an understudied topic, in part due to a lack of consistent access to imaging in resource-limited settings, and I hope to learn more about both the cardiopulmonary complications seen in children and adults with severe malaria and the role of cost-effective and portable imaging modalities (such as portable ultrasound and radiography) in better understanding these complications. Finally, I look forward to learning about the conduct of research studies in resource-limited settings with a high burden of malaria.

What interests you about tropical medicine and what problems are you interested in solving?
As someone who spent a significant portion of her childhood in a resource-limited rural village and had exposure to the fragile healthcare systems of rural Pakistan, I have seen how strong community values and shared understandings about healthcare and medical personnel impact views of and access to healthcare in more remote settings. This is one reason why I am particularly interested in tropical medicine, as when we discuss tropical medicine we are many times talking about remote or rural settings with unique infrastructural barriers to healthcare and where a strong sense of community and collective community values contribute significantly to healthcare. I have also seen and learned about the resourcefulness of such communities with limited healthcare resources, and have been amazed by the neat solutions they develop to address their community’s healthcare needs that local political structures or healthcare organizations in nearby urban areas are unable to adequately address.

I am beyond excited for my Kean project, which is an amalgam of three major areas of interest for me—global rural health, tropical medicine and diagnostic imaging—as I am most passionate about helping to address diagnostic and therapeutic issues related to imaging access in resource-limited rural settings.