Alumni spotlight: Ahmed Elnady

What did you study at the UCL Institute for Global Health (IGH), and when did you graduate?

I studied an MSc in Global Health and Development. I finished the programme in September 2025 and graduated this May.

What influenced your decision to study at UCL IGH?

I came to UCL IGH from a clinical background, having worked as a dentist in Egypt’s health sector, and that experience shaped everything. Patients would often arrive at very advanced stages of oral disease because early intervention simply was not available. Over time I felt I was managing the surface of people’s health problems while the underlying causes went untouched. I stepped away from a conventional career in dentistry because I could see how little it would shift the wider health picture, and I wanted to understand and act on the structural reasons behind what I was seeing. This led me to pursue an MSc in Global Health and Development at University College London, which offered the opportunity to examine the nexus of power and health by exploring the political underpinnings of health inequities.

What aspects of the academic experience at IGH did you find most valuable or distinctive?

My clinical background had made me used to thinking about health in a concrete way. IGH expanded that way of thinking almost immediately, giving me the opportunity to engage with a more interesting set of questions.

Learning how to take lived experience seriously as evidence was the most valuable takeaway. I had not previously thought about qualitative research in that way. At IGH it was not presented as a softer version of research, and I learned to use it to understand how people experience and navigate different barriers in life. I found this side of the programme genuinely eye-opening, and it stayed with me. It gave me a way of thinking that was much broader than what I had expected to gain from a one-year master’s programme.

How did your time at IGH help shape your career or professional direction?

It gave me a much clearer sense of the kind of work I want to do. It also made me less willing to compromise and accept work that treats communities as an afterthought. I think it’s fair to recognise that even with good intentions, institutions can sometimes get swept up in their own priorities, and people’s needs get lost along the way. IGH helped me put language around that discomfort and gave me the confidence to ask harder questions, because this work carries an ethical responsibility. IGH made that responsibility harder to ignore, and I am grateful for that.

How would you describe the IGH community?

There seemed to be a story behind everyone’s work. Both staff and students had come to global health through something they had seen and cared deeply about. There was very little performative language around change, and people were not just repeating the right phrases. That made the environment feel honest. The conversations were intellectually serious and grounded in a real concern for people’s lives.

How did you find living and studying in London?

Living in London after Egypt was an adjustment. Coming from a place where sunshine is simply assumed, I learned to treat any blue sky as a civic event, and that complaining about the weather here is a rite of passage. Whether it’s the clouds or the heat, you will complain about it, and there is no escaping.

Nobody warned me that a flat white would cost roughly what a full meal costs back home, or that I would pay it anyway, every morning, without complaint.

For all the grumbling, I came to love it. London is so diverse that there is something here for everyone, and for me it was the people. The friends I met on the course, whose lives happened to intersect in London to study at UCL, have become the closest friendships I have formed.

In one sentence, how would you describe UCL IGH to a prospective student from your hometown?

UCL IGH is where you go to study global health, then casually find yourself in a lecture by Sir Michael Marmot and think, alright, this is serious.