Zara Khan

Zara is a fourth-year medical student pursuing a Distinction in Global Health at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School in Dallas. Her research focuses on global sexual and reproductive health (SRH), with particular interests in supporting women’s and girls’ agency and empowerment; preventing intimate partner violence; and improving access to and quality of global SRH care, including care for and prevention of reproductive/perinatal infectious diseases such as HIV, syphilis and Zika. With the CDC, she has worked previously on national birth defects surveillance and prevention research; currently, she contributes to the work of CDC’s One Health Office, which responds to emerging infectious threats across the human, animal and agriculture sectors. Prior to medical school, she worked as a public health program associate in the Emory University Hubert Department of Global Health and as a consultant for Ibis Reproductive Health.

Zara received her BA in Cognitive Sciences from Rice University in Houston and her MPH in Epidemiology from Emory University in Atlanta. In her spare time, Zara enjoys reading, writing and biking. Her favorite animal (excluding her cat, Artie) is the African elephant.

What does the Kean Fellowship mean to you?
Though I have been actively involved in global health research for several years, I have been unable to travel abroad for these experiences given COVID-19 restrictions. I am therefore thrilled for the opportunity to complete a fourth-year clinical elective in Vietnam, where I look forward to learning more about the healthcare system and engaging deeply with the people and culture. The Kean Fellowship enables me to take full advantage of this opportunity, lessening the associated financial burden and connecting me with peers and mentors with similar interests. 

What do you anticipate learning?
​I consider my medical education incomplete without direct, practical experience in treating diseases endemic to tropical areas, home to 40 percent of the global population. In medical school, our lectures on tropical diseases often came with the asterisk that we “wouldn’t really see this in practice.” This attitude ignores the realities of climate change and global migration (of people, animals and plants), which every year widen the ranges of vector-borne diseases, contribute to the spread of waterborne diseases and raise the specter for emergence of novel infections. 

What interests you about tropical medicine and what problems are you interested in solving?
I’m particularly interested in learning about special management considerations for tropical diseases in pregnant or breastfeeding patients. For example, Plasmodium vivax malaria has demonstrated associations with adverse pregnancy outcomes. Treatment requires parenteral artesunate and oral artemisinin-based combination therapy, followed by primaquine or tafenoquine to eradicate hypnozoites that can reside within the liver. For pregnant persons, primaquine or tafenoquine are deferred until after delivery, because both medications can cause hemolysis in patients with glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase (G6PD) deficiency, and G6PD status cannot be determined in a fetus (WHO 2016). This is just one example, and I look forward to learning about more through my experiences at the Hospital for Tropical Diseases.