Abraar Karan, MD, MPH, DTM&H
Abraar Karan, MD, MPH, DTM&H
Resident Physician
Brigham and Women's Hospital/Harvard Medical School
Abraar Karan is an internal medicine doctor at the Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School. He is part of the Doris and Howard Hiatt Residency in Global Health Equity, and a columnist at the British Medical Journal. Abraar earned his MD from the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine where he served as Student Body President, and an MPH in health policy from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He subsequently completed a Diploma in Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (DTM&H) from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in 2019.
Abraar's primary interest is in global health, particularly health politics and health systems strengthening with a focus on the socioeconomic and ethical aspects of care delivery. His previous work has included projects in Latin America, Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa. In 2011-2012, as a Yale Parker Huang Fellow, he conducted an anthropological research study in India exploring sex trafficking and intergenerational sex work in Hyderabad and Delhi. He published a paper coining the term "Sonagachi Syndrome" to describe the type of trauma endured by women who are victims of trafficking, named after Asia's largest red light district. Subsequently, Abraar was a 2016 FASPE medical ethics fellow in Auschwitz, studying the role of physician participation in the atrocities of the Holocaust. In 2018, Abraar co-founded Longsleeve insect repellent, winner of the 2018 Harvard Business School New Venture Competition and a finalist in the 2019 Harvard President's Challenge. Abraar was named a 2018 40 Under 40 Healthcare Innovator by MedTech Boston, as well as a 2018 STAT News Wunderkind. In February 2020, Abraar was selected to serve as an advisor to the Commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health on the state's coronavirus epidemic response.
Abraar's writings have been featured in the New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, The BMJ, Academic Medicine, BMC International Health and Human Rights, NPR, Los Angeles Times, Scientific American, Huffpost, the Boston Globe, and many other major publications. His book, "Protecting the Health of the Poor", was published in December 2015.
Abraar graduated with distinction in Political Science from Yale College in 2011, where he was a Yale Journalism Scholar, and the Editor-in-Chief of both the Yale Journal of Public Health, and the Yale Journal of Medicine and Law.