Meet 2024 Award Recipient
Sofia Ahsanuddin
Prior to medical school, Sofia graduated summa cum laude from the Macaulay Honors College at the City University of New York-Brooklyn College where she majored in political science with a minor in chemistry. During college, she was initiated as a member of Phi Betta Kappa, was selected as a TEDxCUNY student speaker, served as Commencement Speaker for the Class of 2016, and received the Political Science Department Public Service Award. She entered the MD program in 2018.
While in medical school, Sofia was a global health scholar and conducted research in plastic surgery with Dr. Peter Taub and Dr. Mairaj Ahmed and in orthopedics with Dr. Jashvant Poeran. She completed a two-year research fellowship in advanced retinal imaging with Dr. Richard Rosen at the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary of Mount Sinai while concurrently completing a one-year research fellowship in regenerative medicine at the Stanford Byers Eye Institute under the supervision of Dr. Albert Wu. Throughout medical school, Sofia has sustained a deep interest in bioethics and advocacy; she was selected as an American Medical Association Journal of Ethics Editorial Fellow, completed a bioethics elective at the Oxford University Ethox Centre in the United Kingdom, and also organized a city-wide conference on health advocacy at the New York Academy of Medicine. Sofia was also a monologue performer for the Story Project in 2023, received 2nd place in the National Medical Association Rabb Venable Excellence in Ophthalmology research competition, and worked as a venture fellow at Draper Associates.
Sofia is grateful to be receiving the Dr. Harold Lamport Biomedical Research Prize. She has published 25 peer-reviewed manuscripts to date and her achievements have been made possible by faith, the unwavering support and love of her husband and family, as well as the investment of numerous faculty and mentors at Mount Sinai and beyond. Sofia would like to thank Drs. Mairaj Ahmed, Jashvant Poeran, Monica Dweck, Sharon Edwards, Rosamond Rhodes, Lauren Linkowski, and Michael Herscher for all their help, as well as Drs. Richard Rosen, Nisha Chadha, and Louis Pasquale for their advice and the opportunities they provided during her research fellowship. Sofia would also like to thank her mentors at the Rabb Venable Program, Sigma Xi for bestowing the Sigma Xi Grant in Aid of Research to complete her work in single-cell genomics at Stanford, the Knights Templar Eye Foundation for awarding her a travel award to attend the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology Meeting in 2022, Dr. Ann Caroline Fisher at the Stanford Clinical Opportunity for Residency Experience Program, and the Roothbert Fund Fellowship for providing a generous scholarship to support her medical school endeavors.
Sofia is delighted to graduate with her MD degree and will be continuing her residency training in ophthalmology at the Kellogg Eye Center of the University of Michigan!