Dr. Sohaila Cheema

Sohaila Cheema, MBBS, MPH, CPH is the Director, Institute for Population Health (IPH) and Assistant Professor of Healthcare Policy and Research at Weill Cornell Medicine - Qatar (WCM-Q). She actively participates in oversight and implementation of IPH education, research and community programs. Dr. Cheema co-directs and teaches the two credit pre-medical course, Health and Disease: A Global Perspective. Additionally, she teaches senior medical students in the Public Health Clerkship and presents seminars to community medicine residents at Hamad Medical Corporation on topics of public health interest.

Dr. Cheema actively collaborates with private and government institutions on programmatic activities aimed at promoting health awareness, disease prevention and self-care in the State of Qatar. Dr. Cheema is WCM-Q’s manager for the Global Educational Exchange in Medicine and the Health Professions (GEMx) program, administered by the Educational Commission for Foreign Medical Graduates (ECFMG), USA. She serves on or has served on many Qatari government/medical school committees. She supervises the Global Health Education and Research Program, which provides unique experiential learning and research opportunities to WCM-Q medical students at Weill Bugando School of Medicine in Tanzania.

Her research interests are multidisciplinary with an emphasis on non-communicable disease paradigm particularly in the areas of obesity, diabetes and the epidemiology of road traffic crashes and injuries. She has published several research articles in peer-reviewed journals, notably “Adolescent Prediabetes in a High Risk Middle East Country: A Cross-sectional Study” in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 2014, “Herbal and Nutritional Supplement Use Among College Students in Qatar” in the Eastern Mediterranean Health Journal, 2015 and “Cancer risk in waterpipe smokers: a meta-analysis in the International Journal of Public Health, 2016.

Dr. Cheema received her medical degree from Dow Medical College, Pakistan and her Master of Public Health from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, USA. She is Certified in Public Health by the National Board of Public Health Examiners, USA. Currently, she is pursuing a Fellowship in Integrative Medicine from the Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine, University of Arizona, USA.