Simal Ali

“Everyone deserves to live the healthiest version of themselves,” says TouroCOM student Simal Ali. This belief motivates Ali to pursue her dream of becoming a physician and help others optimize their own health. “My favorite aspect of medicine is being empowered to educate and take care of our communities beyond the walls of a clinical setting,” she says.

Simal’s journey to medical school began as an undergrad at Drexel University, where she collaborated on research in obesity and neurosurgery at the University of Pennsylvania and worked as a medical scribe in a hematology/oncology office. After interviewing at TouroCOM, Simal knew that was the school she wanted to attend. “I still remember how welcomed I felt on interview day. Every administrator, faculty member, and student I interacted with sincerely seemed like they loved it and that energy was contagious,” she says.

Life on campus is a huge draw for Simal. She values the campus clubs that bring in interesting guest speakers regularly as well as the collaborative culture found in the classrooms. A love of lifestyle medicine, a relatively new medical discipline that complements both osteopathic and allopathic medicine, led her to create a lifestyle medicine campus interest group, which now boasts more than 100 members. “It focuses on evidence-based practices by clinicians trained and certified in the specialty, to prevent, treat and often reverse chronic disease and improve health and quality of life,” she explains. Ali was recently recognized by the American College of Lifestyle Medicine for her efforts!

As a student in the Health Professions Scholarship Program (HPSP), which offers a service scholarship to students in the Army, Navy, or Air Force who attend medical or dental school programs, Simal spent six weeks this past summer with hundreds of medical students from across the country training and learning all about military medicine. “I plan to pursue residency with the Army and become board certified in the field of lifestyle medicine regardless of what I choose as my specialty. It’s a field that is so extremely relevant and complementary to any field of medicine because chronic diseases like diabetes, hypertension, and high cholesterol have become so incredibly common despite being very modifiable conditions. I hope that by educating our communities on best practices for disease prevention we can shift the focus of medicine from mostly disease mediation to health retention,” she says.