From the start of our conversation, I could see how much Parwana Khazi loves what she does. A first-year Ph.D. student in UC San Diego’s Medical Scientist Training Program, Khazi recently began her doctoral research in the Gaulton Lab focusing on Type 2 diabetes in non-European ancestry groups, particularly Middle Eastern and North African cohorts.
Khazi’s work was shaped by her experience in her first two years of medical school, which preceded the start of her Ph.D. She expressed frustration over how the courses she took acknowledged disparities in disease outcomes between different ethnic groups, but fell short of providing meaningful insight into why they exist.
“Why?” she said. “That’s the question we should be asking; that’s the question that really matters. That became very frustrating for me over time; every block was the same conversation.”
Khazi’s dissatisfaction grew deeper when she could no longer ignore that the data on health disparities presented in her classes did not mention people of Middle Eastern descent. “My family is Afghan, and I identify as Middle Eastern, and in the U.S., Middle Eastern people, per the U.S. Census Bureau, are classified as white,” Khazi said.
It’s not just the census — by omitting an option for MENA minorities, health care forms have obscured the health outcomes of people who identify as Middle Eastern by aggregating them under the white category.
“The question that kept coming up was, we’re talking about genetics based on ancestry, but what do we know about people that share backgrounds with mine?” she said. She had planned to do her Ph.D. in anthropology, but Khazi’s interest shifted to bridging genetics and social sciences. “I realized that’s my happy place,” she said. “I was like, ‘Oh yeah, this is fun!’”
Khazi’s various academic interests date back to her undergraduate studies at Santa Clara University, where she earned a Bachelor of Science in biomedical biology and public health science, along with a Bachelor of Arts in Spanish studies. Khazi then completed her master’s degree in a social science program at UCLA while concentrating in anthropology.
As a true multidisciplinarian in a field that is often tunnel-visioned by design, Khazi wanted her work to include historical and social considerations in cutting-edge genomic data analysis that could help answer the questions that her medical school education had raised.
Her proposed research entails combing through vast existing datasets to determine which genetic variants are associated with an increased or decreased risk of disease Type 2 diabetes in MENA cohorts. She plans to use her first-stage results to evaluate how well current risk-forecasting models work for historically understudied ancestry groups and find ways to make those models more equitable. Through this work, she hopes to inform how doctors select patients to screen for Type 2 diabetes and how they personalize medications based on patients’ genetic backgrounds.
Having worked in fields as disparate as biophysics and anthropology, throughout her research career, “The one thing that’s changed the most is appreciating that we don’t need to silo ourselves, and realizing that it’s a lot more powerful not to,” Khazi reflected.
But what hasn’t changed, according to Khazi, is what drives her.
“I started doing research because I thought people are fascinating, and I’m still here because I think people are fascinating — both in the ways that we’re all similar and we’re all different,” she said. “All of that is beautiful and worth studying.”
