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While growing up, a career in medicine appealed to Dr. Hana Abdalla because of the community good she could accomplish. Women’s health issues also intrigued her because so many of them were not openly discussed in her native Sudan.
“They were taboo,” says Abdalla, 35. “It was considered dirty to speak about them.” The lack of public awareness about women’s physiology illustrated her homeland’s patriarchal climate in the 1980s and 1990s, says Abdalla, currently a University of Maryland, College Park research associate.
A firsthand run-in with similar social mores occurred in 1997 when, as a college teacher in Sudan, Abdalla sought routine travel documents for an academic conference overseas. A male government official wouldn’t consider her application without a letter from her father endorsing her travel. Even after Abdalla provided the letter, the official detained her for hours and accused her of insidious motives.
That detention convinced Abdalla it was best to leave her country. She held a bachelor’s in medical laboratory science, the U.S. equivalent of biomedicine, from Omdurman Ahlia University, where she’d also taught for two years. With more education and clout, she thought, she could perhaps better help women improve their own health care and overall quality of life. “It wasn’t just about work and science, but also about me working with women and for women,” she says. “Maybe I can help cure a disease.”
A relative helped arrange passage for her on a London-bound cargo plane. Abdalla eventually moved on to Sweden, where she earned a master’s in infectious medicine at the Karolinska Institutet and a doctorate in medical microbiology from Linköping University. Along the way, she took advantage of opportunities to study cervical cytology, absorbing more about gynecological health than she believes would have been possible had she stayed in Sudan.
At a conference, she met a UMD faculty member, which led to her hire in January 2008 to do tuberculosis vaccine research.
