Mentors
Hadi Juratli
Mentor, MD Admissions Fellowship 2026-27MS3, Stanford Medicine, Knight Hennessy ScholarHadi is a third-year medical student at Stanford University School of Medicine. He graduated from University of Michigan, where he was involved in healthcare accessibility and cardiovascular research. He is passionate about the body-brain axis and conducts research on disorders of olfactory processing. In his free time, he reads (mostly about cars) and plays pickup basketball.
Layth Alkhani
Mentor, MD Admissions & Roots Fellowships 2026-27MS1, Northwestern Feinberg School of MedicineLayth is a first-year medical student at Northwestern Feinberg School of Medicine. He graduated from Stanford with a degree in Biomolecular Engineering & Medical Design where he served as a spiritual director for the Muslim Student Union and spearheaded refugee medical and humanitarian initiatives in Jordan, Turkey, and Syria. His clinical interests involve expanding access to minimally invasive procedures in under-resourced communities, with a focus on Interventional Radiology. In his free time, Layth enjoys playing soccer and spending time with friends.
Saaim Khan
Mentor, MD Admissions & Roots Fellowships 2026-27Saaim is a second-year medical student at Harvard Medical School. He graduated from Harvard with a degree in Human Developmental & Regenerative Biology and American Sign Language. In college, he was involved heavily in global education projects, Deaf/hard-of-hearing advocacy, and the Pakistani and Muslim student organizations. His scientific interests lie at the intersection of genomics and innovating novel diagnostic techniques and gene therapies for hearing loss. Saaim enjoys long walks, watching ice hockey, and playing the piano and bassoon.
MS2, Harvard Medical School
Taimur Kouser, MD, MA
Mentor, MD Admissions & Roots Fellowships 2026-2027Taimur is a resident physician in neurology at Yale Medicine. He graduated from Stanford School of Medicine with his MD degree and a scholarly concentration in clinical research and neuroscience. He graduated with a joint degree in Neuroscience & Philosophy from Harvard and a language citation in Arabic, as well as a Master’s in bioethics, tech ethics, and science policy from Duke. He was a Fulbright scholar in neurophilosophy at LMU-Munich. He is also currently a Master’s student in Islamic studies with a concentration in Islamic sciences at The Islamic Seminary of America.
Resident Physician, Neurology, Yale Medicine
Ummesalmah Abdulbaseer, MD
Mentor, Roots Fellowship 2026-2027Ummesalmah is a Hospice and Palliative Medicine Fellow at NewYork-Presbyterian (NYP Columbia/Cornell). A Chicago-native, she completed medical school at the University of Illinois College of Medicine and residency in Internal Medicine at Rush University. She is passionate about how religion and medicine overlap and is a researcher at the Initiative on Islam & Medicine and an educator of religiously-informed care. In her free time, she volunteers with her local Masjid, enjoys nature, watches true-crime documentaries, or thinks of terrible puns.
Fellow, Palliative Care, NewYork Presbyterian
Zeshan Hussain, MD, PhD
Resident Physician, Internal Medicine (Research Track), Brigham & Women's HospitalMentor, Roots Fellowship 2026-2027Zeshan is a second-year resident physician in internal medicine at Brigham & Women's Hospital/MGB at Harvard Medical School. A computer scientist by training, he pursued his MD/PhD, earning his MD from Harvard Medical School and his PhD from MIT's EECS department. Prior to that, he completed a BS/MS in Computer Science from Stanford University. His research spans fundamental areas of machine learning, including representation learning, large language models, causal inference, and physician-AI interaction, with a primary clinical focus in oncology. Involved in the Muslim community for many years, Zeshan served as president of the Muslim Student Union at Stanford University and led the Harvard Longwood Muslim community before becoming a resident tutor at Winthrop House, where he organized programming for Muslim life. He has also studied (and continues to study) traditionally, including the Quranic sciences, Arabic, and Hanafi fiqh and usul ul-fiqh, under scholars from Egypt, Palestine, and the UK.