In 2013, Ward Alktaish’s future was clouded by a civil war in Syria that drew ever closer to the Damascus home he shared with his parents and two sisters. By 2013, President Bashir Assad had turned chemical weapons on his own people, including in a Damascus suburb, killing hundreds, many of them children.
“My parents realized that it was very unsafe, that there might not be a future for us there; that the best future for us was to go abroad,” said Alktaish, who was 12 at the time.
Passage to the U.S. was a longshot. The Syrian civil war created 2.5 million refugees, but the U.S. only accepted 36 in 2013. Alktaish’s family requested and was granted asylum. They made the most of their second chance as his older sister is now a pediatric resident, his younger sister is applying to law schools and Alktaish is in his third year as a medical student at Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine.
“Learning how to persevere at a young age really shapes your adult life,” he said. It was the mix of science in service to helping people that attracted him to medicine.
What drew him to BU for medical school wasn’t just the opportunity to work with underserved populations, but the wealth of research and access to faculty leading those efforts. His undergraduate and master’s thesis at BU were on research he did in the lab of Yang Jin, MD, PhD, professor of medicine, on the cellular mechanism of how bacterial infections injure the lungs and create lethal acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS).
The more we learn about (a disease or condition), the more we can create targeted therapies with less harmful side effects.
Ward Alktaish
In medical school Alktaish joined the lab of Naomi Hamburg, MD, Joseph A. Vita Professor of Medicine. Two years later, he is the lead author of a paper studying the impacts of vaping on the cardiovascular system of young adults 18-24. He’s coordinating results from other researchers, as well as his own research, and data analysis from BU’s Biostatistics and Epidemiology Data Analytics Center.
“The more you go into medicine and the more you advance in your career, the more you realize there are a lot of things we don’t know,” said Alktaish. “The more we learn about (a disease or condition), the more we can create targeted therapies with less harmful side effects.”