About Bayan Galal

Bayan Galal was born in Prospect, Connecticut, as one of five children of Egyptian immigrants. Raised in a large Arab family, she absorbed communal values centered on mutual responsibility, and these early lessons shaped her understanding of care as a shared commitment sustained across generations and borders.

Growing up between the United States and Egypt, Bayan came to see how structural gaps in health systems follow families across different contexts. She witnessed relatives in Egypt navigate chronic illness within fragmented and resource-limited settings, experiences that first drew her toward questions of access and continuity in care. In high school, she served as an emergency medical technician, caring for patients whose vulnerabilities mirrored those she had seen abroad. Together, these experiences sparked her interest in medicine and grounded her commitment to strengthening health systems for Middle Eastern and African diasporas, both in the United States and internationally.

Bayan earned her bachelor’s degree from Yale University, where she studied molecular biology and global affairs. She was elected student body president, becoming the first Arab and Muslim student to hold that role in the Ivy League. In this position, she focused on reducing structural barriers to student well-being, advancing reforms to financial aid and academic policies. During this time, she also conducted public health research with national ministries of health, consulted for the World Health Organization, and interned with global NGOs such as Save the Children and the International Rescue Committee. Her work has been published in The Lancet and JAMA Network Open, among other journals.

Bayan later completed a master’s in population health sciences at the University of Cambridge as a Marshall Scholar, where her research focused on population-level cancer screening strategies. Bayan then began medical school at the University of Pennsylvania. At Penn, she led the United Community Clinic, a student-run free clinic serving immigrant communities in Philadelphia, and founded Providing Access to Health, a health navigation program supported by the University’s $100,000 Projects for Progress Award. Internationally, she works on several research projects in the Middle East and Africa focused on strengthening health data infrastructure. She also serves as national chair-elect of the student branch of the Association of American Medical Colleges, representing nearly 100,000 medical students nationwide, and is the co-author of a chapter in an upcoming Springer textbook on leadership in academic medicine.

Through clinical care, research, and system design, Bayan seeks to advance and strengthen health systems both domestically and abroad.