Truth in numbers: How Nadia Abuelezam’s Models Help Us Understand Health Disparities
by Timothy Gower
In recent years, structural racism’s impact on health has emerged as one of the most important issues in medicine. But epidemiologist Nadia Abuelezam, an associate professor at the Connell School of Nursing (CSON), has been thinking about how racial and ethnic identity affect well-being since the 1990s—when she was in grade school.
“I grew up in an immigrant family,” says Abuelezam, whose parents came to the United States from Palestine. As a child, she was proud of her heritage, but something puzzled her: the standardized tests she took in school required her to provide personal demographic information, but they never included a check box for “Arab American.” That early observation informs Abuelezam’s research to this day. “If everyone isn’t counted, then everyone isn’t represented in the data,” she says. “And if everyone isn’t represented, then we’re not able to properly assess and address people’s health needs.” Through mathematical modeling, Abuelezam applies her passion for numbers to find the missing data needed to fight disparities that inf luence health outcomes for underserved populations. In 2021, she received a Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award (MIRA) from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences for a project titled “Advancing Methods in Infectious
10 voice | spring 2022
Diseases Models: Incorporating Structural Causes.” Abuelezam will use the fiveyear, $1.9 million grant to ask and answer questions that are intensely relevant to present and future health crises. How do factors such as your ZIP code, education, job, and diet inf luence your risk for the f lu or COVID-19? If you get infected, how do these variables affect whether you have mild symptoms or end up in the hospital—or worse? How might eliminating health disparities ease the impact of infectious diseases like COVID-19 on hard-hit communities? Those who know Abuelezam’s work say she is the right researcher to confront these questions. “Nadia is one of the leading scholars of her generation in the field of population health,” says epidemiologist Sandro Galea, M.D., dean and Robert A. Knox Professor at the Boston University School of Public Health, who has collaborated with Abuelezam on several studies. “She’s a clear thinker and really committed to pursuing interesting and relevant
