Who, What, Why: Medical student Bayan Galal aims to tackle global health challenges

When visiting family members in Egypt, Bayan Galal saw the health challenges they faced: difficulty accessing emergency care and problems managing chronic illnesses.

That inspired her to pursue a career oriented toward global health, along with a medical degree from Penn, where she is in her first year at the Perelman School of Medicine.

“Those, for me, were really formative experiences in terms of understanding what access to health care looks like and how it differs based on where you are and who you are,” says Galal, from Prospect, Connecticut.

A graduate of Yale University and the University of Cambridge on a Marshall Scholarship, Galal says her master’s in population health sciences gave her the big-picture view to complement her family’s lived experience.

At Yale, she volunteered as a patient coordinator with a local free clinic, helping schedule appointments, coordinate transportation, and plan medication delivery. “I really gained an up-close view of what patient care looked like on a practical level,” she says. On a global scale, she worked on a consulting project with the World Health Organization and presented her work to the assistant director-general in Switzerland.

Here at Penn, she is a co-coordinator for the United Community Clinic, serving uninsured patients many of whom are African immigrants. She is also Penn’s delegate to the Organization of Student Representatives of the Association of American Medical Colleges and co-symposium coordinator for the Penn Global Surgery Group.

The idea of clinical medicine has always been at the center of her plans. “There is such a beauty to the physician-patient relationship,” Galal says. “It’s really unique how much of an impact you can have with patients on an individual level.” She says there is an elegance to the rhythms of patient care—diagnosis, treatment, follow-up—that could inspire her approach to bigger-picture, large-scale change.

Galal came to Penn in part because of the ability to concentrate in areas such as global health. Students who do the global health certificate are required to pursue international experiences in research and in clinical rotation. “I loved that these opportunities would be embedded within my time in medical school, and that really let me hold on to my commitment to both fields at once,” she says.

Galal is also a graduate associate at Penn’s Perry World House, where she is the only medical student in her cohort. Associates participate in a monthly policy seminar, receive mentoring from visiting fellows, and write a policy brief aimed at publication. “I have so much that I can learn from classmates who are students at other Penn graduate schools, and I cherish the multi-disciplinary nature of the environment,” she says.

She hasn’t yet decided on her medical specialty but is aiming toward a career simultaneously centered on clinical medicine and global health. “I want to use each field to inform the other and strive toward that ultimate goal of better health experiences and outcomes for underserved populations,” she says. 

Medical school is challenging, but “a very novel experience whatever you’ve studied or done in the past.” The biggest difficulty, she says, is how to consume the sheer volume of content the future physicians must handle. 

Still, Galal says, “Mastering the content is not just about me; it’s about how I’m going to use it to serve future patients. I owe it to others to learn it as well as I possibly can, and it’s exciting to know there are such stakes to everything that I’m learning.”