Hina Raheel

Hina Raheel, MSc, BScN, RN, is the recipient of the M. Louise Fitzpatrick Scholarship. She is a third year PhD candidate at the Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing (NHWSON) at Emory University. Ms. Raheel is originally from Pakistan and received her Bachelor of Science in Nursing and Master of Science in Epidemiology & Biostatistics from the Aga Khan University, Karachi, Pakistan.

She first considered nursing as a potential career choice when her dad grappled with a potentially fatal disease being admitted to ICU for over three weeks. Nurses in ICU physically and emotionally supported her and her family. The support she received during that time made her passionate about becoming a nurse herself. She pursued nursing with the hope of helping others and as a way of giving back. While practicing as an ICU nurse in Pakistan, she witnessed the utter lack of hospital facilities for patients and came to appreciate the importance of preventive measures as one of the best public health tools. She noticed that there was a lack of public health nurses in Pakistan and not many nurses were involved in research that could help identify best public health interventions. This led her to embark on a journey to become a public health advocate herself and to be trained in epidemiology.

Ms. Raheel has a long career in research spanning over a few different countries. Her research mainly focuses on women’s health and empowerment. Throughout her career trajectory, working with experts in global and public health, she recognized the value that the addition of nurses can provide. Therefore, she pursued a PhD in nursing working on a global health project. She takes pride in telling others that she is a nurse working and advocating for women empowerment at a global scale.

Her current doctoral research focuses on studying the impact of community-based working group interventions targeted at reducing plastic waste burning and on women’s empowerment in Guatemala. This project aims to bring attention to the importance of community involvement in achieving women’s empowerment. She is the recipient of Emory’s Halle graduate research fellowship that funded her pre-dissertation work. That work and support allowed her to adapt the tools used for dissertation work involving a low-literacy population in Guatemala. She is also a fellow of the inaugural cohort of empowering women for leadership in global health (EMERGE) at Emory University.

She aims to create a space for herself in the field of global health and become a subject matter expert in global health and women’s health research. By doing so, she can pave a path for upcoming generations of nurses to see global health research as an important and integral part of nursing practice.