Aminah Sallam

Aminah Sallam is the daughter of an Egyptian immigrant, was born in Houston, and moved to New York City at the age of fourteen. Growing up as an Arab American Muslim, Aminah became acutely aware of the struggles facing minorities and immigrant populations, especially within our current healthcare model. Her work at Albert Einstein Medical College in the genetic basis for variability in disease phenotype for DiGeorge Syndrome ultimately won her third place internationally as part of Intel’s Science and Engineering Competition. Aminah continued to study genetics at the University of Chicago, where she realized that most medical models for disease are based solely off a Caucasian biological model, and thus could not account for the complications seen in patients of color with the same illnesses. She began to study the origins of breast cancer in African Women, researching often overlooked populations in Tunisia, Algeria, Nigeria, Cameroon and Uganda. Her work found that current diagnostic technology can be adapted to improve diagnostic and therapeutic measures in breast cancer patients of color in resource poor settings. Aminah is currently a medical student at Yale, where she hopes to leverage her experiences to advocate for female minority populations often overlooked or ignored by our current medical model.