Ifrah Abshir (PhD, ‘26) spent the first years of her life in a Ugandan refugee camp with her Somali family, fleeing civil war and hoping for resettlement. At age 3, she arrived in the U.S. with her parents and five siblings, eventually growing up in Seattle. Her journey into public health began with a question she couldn’t stop asking: Why isn’t anyone studying what we know is happening in our communities?
As an undergraduate studying healthcare management at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, Abshir originally imagined a future in hospital administration. But it was the research questions that drew her in.
“I’d accompany family and community members to medical appointments, and I kept seeing the same thing: people struggling with clear signs of distress, but screening negative for mental health conditions,” she says. “No one was making the connection between physical symptoms like headaches or stomach aches and trauma, which is how it often shows up in Somali culture.”
Abshir knew that this disconnect was creating blind spots for the healthcare system and causing people to suffer needlessly. No studies were being done on the Somali immigrant community. Abshir looked for data and couldn’t find it.
“That exclusion of entire communities from the data is what drove me toward public health,” Abshir says. “I originally wanted to go into medicine, but realized I wanted to be closer to the root of the problem. I wanted to build evidence around what I already knew was happening, because data is what drives change.”
Now a PhD student in Health Services Research, Policy & Administration (in the School of Public Health), Abshir is doing exactly that. She’s spent her graduate education exploring issues ranging from the barriers that lead to “hospital hopping” among Somali patients trying to avoid stigmatizing diagnoses, to the widespread absence of community-specific data across the academic literature.
At the School of Public Health, Abshir says she’s found a rare kind of support. “I’ve been able to use class projects to investigate things I’ve always been curious about in the Somali, refugee and immigrant communities. I’ve never been told that what I want to study is too localized or too niche,” she says. “The coursework teaches you the methods, and then gives you the freedom to apply them to your own questions.”
Abshir often applies her coursework to investigating health outcomes in the Somali community, which has only highlighted the lack of data available to do so. “I’ve spent hours looking for peer-reviewed research on Somali immigrant health,” she says. “Most of the time, there’s nothing.”
She’s setting out to change that, with help from the John E. and Marjorie L. Kralewski Family Fellowship. “My parents weren’t able to pursue education beyond high school,” she says.
Her long-term vision stretches across continents. She hopes to return to Somalia and help rebuild its health systems, joining a growing wave of diaspora professionals contributing to the country’s future. But whether she’s working abroad or in the U.S., her goal remains the same: to design health systems that are data-driven, inclusive and kind. “I want to help people navigate care,” she says, “but I also want to help the system become more navigable in the first place.”
Support students like Ifrah Abshir by giving to a University of Minnesota scholarship.
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