Atiya Shahid is a proud native of Saint Louis, Missouri and currently a graduate student at Ƶ where she is working on a dual degree Master of Public Health and PhD in Interdisciplinary Pathobiology emphasizing in Epidemiology and Risk Analysis. Her undergraduate career was completed at Xavier University of Louisiana where she obtained her Bachelor of Science in Public Health.
During her years in the Graduate Public Health program, she advanced from Vice-President to President of the Graduate Public Health Association. During her tenure with the program, she has worked with organizations such as Black Ladies in Public Health, Montgomery Medical Advocacy and Outreach, Macon Means, and the Alabama Department of Public Health to produce educational seminars and workshops for the students and surrounding community.
Her current research involves decreasing the morbidity and mortality rates of Black women living with HIV, HPV, and Cervical Cancer within the Blackbelt region of Alabama. She previously won the second place in the AllOfUs Minority Research Symposium funded by the National Institutes of Health for her research on “Cervical Cancer Disparities within the United States”. She is now a representative for the annual symposium’s advisory committee as well as the Macon County AllofUs Advisory Committee.
Most recently, her research was published in “The Journal of Healthcare, Science, and the Humanities” for her research “The Relation of Age on HIV-Positive Women’s Cluster of Differentiation 4, Antiretroviral Therapy, Papanicolaou Test, Human Papillomavirus test and Visual Inspection with Acetic Acid”.
Atiya also obtained a Master’s degree in Animal Science from Ƶ. While obtaining this degree, she worked as a teaching assistant, which helped her to realize her passion for teaching on a collegiate level because of how instrumental it was for her to see a black woman in that space. After graduation, she aspires to become a professor at a HBCU, hoping to give to her students what her professors poured into her.