Douaa Mugahid

What drives me most is having an impact on the world, something I think runs in the family to my father's side. Over the years, I've developed the skill of identifying gaps in very niche areas where I think people have overlooked something important or there's not enough people with a diversity of perspectives or expertise working on a problem. As a non-competitive person, that's been how I've navigated my career choices, less about what other people think is important at the time, what is most lucrative, or provides the most status, but what I think is an important problem that clearly has not been solved, and where I am convinced I can fill an important gap. In the end, it's really about identifying a big gap that has a big impact on communities.

I really care about people, especially vulnerable populations, which is why it's no surprise that I've wound my way towards working on tuberculosis. This is an infectious disease that mostly affects people in the Global South - largely invisible to many in the Global North and ignored by many professional drug developers because they assume they can't make a huge profit serving these populations. But the COVID19 pandemic has shown the world how detrimental respiratory infectious diseases can be for societies, especially the most vulnerable, and that they can spread and affect everyone if not controlled well.

Similarly, I realized there's a problem with access to knowledge for people who speak Arabic not English and I try to bridge that gap through my work with the Scientific Arab Forum. 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 given facts, kept in the dark about things, not allowed autonomy, so they're not able to make good choices in life. I pick these problems and try to do something about them. I am aware I will never 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 the same thing.

Perhaps the words "perfection is the enemy of good", which have really helped me realize that growth and change are incremental and that lived experience allows us to make mistakes and grow from them so what we do next, not necessarily in the moment, is better and better.

One thing would be to be bold, and don't let other people dictate what you can and cannot do. Another would be, be a lifelong learner and improve yourself constantly, so that in a fast-changing world, you are adaptable and can shift. A third thing is don't let titles define you. As you chart your own path your title will always change so it doesn't really matter as long as you're doing something that you really, really care about and has a lot of real-world impact.

One of the biggest challenges in my field is that tuberculosis continues to cause significant global illness and death but the resources available to work on curbing the problem are becoming increasingly limited. 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 across populations.

I believe everyone deserves access to healthcare and knowledge for a better shot at life, which informs my values. The values most important to me are a strong commitment to honest, meaningful impact and serving the most vulnerable. I also value collaboration, lifelong learning, and ensuring that high-quality knowledge and scientific information are accessible to others.