Douaa Mugahid, Ph.D.

What drives me most is having an impact on the world. Over the years, I've developed this skill of identifying gaps. I'm not a competitive person, so I don't thrive in very hot areas where everyone is working. I thrive in very niche areas where I think people have overlooked something, and there's not enough people working on this problem. That's kind of been how I navigate my career choices, less about what other people think is important, what makes you money, or status, but what is an important problem that clearly has not been solved, and where there aren't enough people trying, or maybe not people with enough diverse expertise. What can I bring to that problem that can help move the needle? In the end, it's really about identifying a big gap that has a big impact on communities or people. I really care about people, especially vulnerable populations. TB affects people in the Global South, it's invisible to many people and drug developers because they can't make a huge profit off of these people. These are poor countries mostly, they don't have huge purchasing power, so investing in TB research is not something a lot of companies want to do. That means academics have to carry most of that work forward. That's why I picked TB. I identify a gap, like the problem with access to knowledge for people who speak Arabic, and I try to bridge that gap. I feel like that's why we have a lot of the world's problems - it's ignorance, it's people not being served by the educational system, not having autonomy, not given facts, kept in the dark about things, so they're not able to make good choices in life. I pick problems where there's not someone working on them and try to do something about them. I don't think I will single-handedly ever solve these problems, so I like to collaborate and work with other people and build a community of like-minded people who care about this.

One thing would be be bold, and don't let other people dictate what you can and cannot do. Be a lifelong learner, so work on improving yourself constantly, work on learning new things, so that in a fast-changing world, you are adaptable, you can shift, you can move, and you can learn how to be a good learner as you age and become less invested and more flexible. The other thing is don't let titles define you. You can always chart your own path, and your title will always change, and it doesn't matter what your title is, as long as you're doing something that you really, really care about and that it really has a lot of impact.

One of the biggest challenges in my field is that tuberculosis continues to cause significant global illness and death but often receives limited attention because the populations most affected have less purchasing power, and traditional clinical trials are extremely costly and slow. At the same time, there are major opportunities to accelerate progress by developing safe human-challenge models for faster vaccine testing and by using digital, data-driven tools to modernize outbreak detection and identify health threats earlier.

The values most important to me in my work and personal life are a strong commitment to meaningful impact and serving vulnerable populations. I also value collaboration, lifelong learning, and ensuring that high-quality knowledge and scientific information are accessible to others.