Co-Director, Emory Global Diabetes Research Center
“It’s a field where you're trying to close the gap between research and policy and practice. It has really lent itself to the parts of my brain that work on organization, on psychology, and on what it takes to get people and populations to adopt and then sustain positive health behaviors.”
Mohammed Ali, MD, believes that when it comes to academic and career pursuits, diversity is the spice of life. As a professor in the Hubert Department of Global health, co-director of the Emory Global Diabetes Research Center, and practicing primary care physician, he focuses his energy on a wide array of projects across disciplines.
“That's why I'm in primary care and never became a specialist,” Ali says. “I enjoy the variety of things that come through the door, and that’s similar in my research.”
Two of Ali’s main areas of expertise are cardiometabolic diseases, such as diabetes, and implementation science. He gravitated toward studying cardiometabolic diseases throughout his medical training because of personal and family history, but his interest in implementation science was sparked by his mentor.
When first embarking on his career in academia, Ali was not sure how to make his mark in diabetes research. That is when his mentor, Dr. K M Venkat Narayan, introduced him to the field of implementation science, which focuses on how to get existing treatments and interventions to the people who need them. In this, he feels that he has found his niche.
“It’s a field where you're trying to close the gap between research and policy and practice,” Ali says. “It has really lent itself to the parts of my brain that work on organization, on psychology, and on what it takes to get people and populations to adopt and then sustain positive health behaviors.”
Ali shares his passion for and expertise in implementation science with master’s students through a course, GH 509, which he developed 15 years ago. What started as a small class has now grown to over 60 students per year as interest and scholarship in the field has grown.
For those interested in implementation and applied public health, Ali says that there is no better place than Rollins due to its connections with agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, CARE, the American Cancer Society, Task Force for Global Health, CARE, and more. He also highlights the unique opportunities that the Emory Global Diabetes Research Center offers to students and researchers interested in chronic disease on a global scale.
“I've often said that we are the mecca of global chronic disease research. There is no center like ours in the United States,” Ali says. “We’re fortunate that, over the 15 years I've been here, we have expanded to about 150 affiliated faculty around the university and Atlanta at large. This gives a student a tremendous diversity of faculty expertise and opportunities to tap into.”