The Wisconsin Population Health Service Fellowship

Wajiha Akhtar, Phd, MPH

Assistant Director of the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute and Director of the Wisconsin Population Health Service Fellowship

Wajiha Akhtar is the Assistant Director of the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute. Before joining the Institute, Dr. Akhtar served as an Associate Scientist within the Department of Medicine at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health. Her research focused on investigating novel approaches to preventing the infectious disease consequences of injection drug use in Wisconsin through community-based research. Wajiha also served as an Injury and Violence Prevention Epidemiologist at the Wisconsin Department of Health Services. Prior to serving at the Wisconsin Department of Health Services, she worked at the District of Columbia Department of Health assessing health care utilization among people living with HIV. Dr. Akhtar specializes in utilizing epidemiological methods to assess policies associated with community-level outcomes, assessing large secondary datasets for evaluation, and engaging with targeted stakeholders for the purposes of decreasing health inequities within our society.

Dr. Akhtar received her BS in biomedical engineering from the University of Miami and received her master’s in public health and doctorate in epidemiology from the University of Florida. Wajiha also serves on the Board of Directors for One City Schools in Madison, Wisconsin, and HEART, a national non-profit promoting sexual health and sexual violence literacy in Muslim communities.