Biography

Pulmonary Critical Care physician

Dr. Nahreen Ahmed is originally from the Greater Philadelphia area, she attended Drexel University College of Medicine and attended residency at UIC, Chicago where she concomitantly completed her MPH and a chief year. She completed fellowship in Pulmonary Critical care at NYU/Bellevue which is where she launched her Global Health Career by founding the Bangladesh Ultrasound Initiative, a training program for critical care physicians in Dhaka, Bangladesh. This program has now successfully trained over 150 physicians in bedside ultrasound and has become self-sustaining. She joined the faculty at Penn in 2017 and is currently an Assistant Professor in Clinical Medicine as well as a Penn Center for Global Health Scholar. Within one year she helped to train the entire faculty of the division of Critical Care in Point-of-Care Ultrasound as well as co-founded the Philadelphia Area Critical Care Ultrasound Program which is the first of its kind in the area, wherein all 7 city hospitals were brought together to train incoming Critical Care fellows in Point-of-Care Ultrasound and has been ongoing since its inception in 2018. Since that time she has participated in a critical care training program in Ethiopia with the East African Training Initiative and has gone on to design and implement training programs for healthcare workers in crisis and conflict zones such as Yemen, Gaza, Syria, Sierra Leone, Rohingya Refugee Camps in Bangladesh, at the border of Columbia and Venezuela and in Ukraine through a non-profit organization called MedGlobal. For six years across various roles at MedGlobal she has supported response efforts across the globe including in the role of Medical Director during which she led emergency response efforts in the wake of both natural disasters as well as war and conflict. She has worked in active war zones such as Yemen, Ukraine, Syria, Sudan and Gaza and is well versed in navigating the complexities of conflict and working alongside of local organizations, coordinating bodies and iNGOs, to ensure access to healthcare for the most vulnerable. In addition she has collaborated with members of the Penn Global Emergency Medicine Program to help initiate a Certification Program in Emergency Medicine in Dhaka Bangladesh and has volunteered with the Indian Health Services in Navajo nation for three separate missions to aide in their Covid response and their vaccination efforts. Dr. Ahmed has a strong belief in capacity building and empowering local clinicians and health care systems as a way to decrease health inequities across the globe.