Samir Al-Ali

Expanding What It Means to Care

On his first day of a rotation in Internal Medicine, medical student Samir Al-Ali knew that the conversation would be a difficult one.

The 39-year-old patient, an undocumented immigrant from Honduras with a history of alcohol use disorder, had experienced an acute bout of hepatitis. The incident severely damaged the patient’s liver. But lacking health insurance, he wouldn’t be able to receive a liver transplant, the only viable treatment option. Al-Ali would tell him that he had just a few months left with his loved ones.

“Health is both a gift and a human right. The more I understand the reach of public health and medicine, the more determined I am to help ensure everyone can share in that gift.”

Al-Ali made himself a promise that he’d do more to help people on a structural level, in addition to caring for individual patients in a system that often fails them.

The next summer, Al-Ali, a son of Palestinian immigrants, attended a public health intensive course hosted by Harvard and Birzeit universities in Palestine. Students explored structural determinants of health and the patchwork Palestinian health system. Several months later, the Israel-Hamas War devastated an already crippled system. Hoping to contribute from afar, Al-Ali helped raise money for humanitarian aid, organized speakers at Johns Hopkins to raise awareness about health care in Gaza, and conducted research with faculty about a novel model for wound management that emerged there.

He volunteered with the HEAL Refugee Health & Asylum Collaborative and Health Care for the Homeless, both Baltimore-based organizations that serve displaced people. After completing medical school, Al-Ali envisions serving individual patients as an anesthesiologist and critical care physician, while working to improve health care systems for disadvantaged populations in humanitarian contexts.

“My dream is to serve people in all aspects of their well-being, spanning the individual, community, and structural levels,” he says.